Brute Strength (6 page)

‘And,' Betty added, ‘I told him to tell Pippy that according to Malamute Rescue, responsible breeders take permanent lifetime responsibility for the lives they bring into this world. Is she still pestering you about Rowdy?' Betty reminds me so vividly of my Kimi that I understand what she means even when she doesn't say it outright. Now, what she actually meant was that I was at fault for allowing Pippy to get away with plaguing me.

‘Now and then,' I said. ‘If she doesn't take back this puppy, at least I'll have the perfect excuse to turn her down. And I know that you don't think I need an excuse! But Pippy is someone I don't want as an enemy.'

‘Hah! I'd send her away with a flea in her ear,' Betty said. ‘Now, there's one other thing. Have you had any peculiar phone calls?'

‘Yes. On Sunday. Why? Have you?'

‘No.' Betty sounded offended, possibly at the notion that a crank caller would dare to target her. ‘Katrina had one. She is very upset.' Katrina was a quiet young woman who'd begun to do foster care after she and her husband had adopted a dog from us three years earlier. ‘She is very sensitive, you know. She takes things to heart.' Betty sounded as if the concept of sensitivity were so foreign to me that I required a translation.

‘Was her call about rescue? Mine was . . . I think it was personal. It was some man who asked for Vinnie. Vinnie was my last golden. At first, I thought the name was a coincidence. I just thought he had a wrong number. But he knew my name, and then he started laughing and laughing. And it turned into an obscene phone call. I hung up.'

‘Oh, dear. It does sound like the same sick man. But how did he know about your dog?'

‘
Dog's Life
. Or the web. I've written a lot about her.'

‘Oh,' said Betty, who venerated the Alaskan malamute and couldn't understand why I'd ever bother to write about another breed.

I said, ‘Maybe the thing to do is to hope that he's made his calls, and that's that. No, you know what? It's possible that other people have had calls that we don't know about. And if it's someone with a grudge against all of us, the whole organization, then there might be people he hasn't called yet. We ought to warn them. I'll post to the list.'

As soon as I hung up, I went to my office and sent a message to the little email list maintained for active volunteers in our organization:

After sending the message, I worked on an article about preventing pet poisoning in the home. The topic is a staple for dog writers. It's up there with such all-too-familiar subjects as treating flea infestations and teaching your dog to like vet visits. As I would obviously never admit in print, I was thoroughly tired of warning people about the toxicity of almost all common house plants and shrubs, but my editor at
Dog's Life
had insisted, so I was once again hammering out cautionary words about aloe, pothos, oleander, tulips, ferns, foxglove, and so forth. When I took a break to check my email, I found only one reply to the message I'd sent earlier:

The obscene calls angered me but didn't scare me. Our next-door neighbor, Kevin Dennehy, is a Cambridge cop, and Rita is, of course, a shrink. On previous occasions, I'd heard both of them express professional opinions about anonymous callers. Kevin and Rita had agreed that the people who made these calls were afraid of direct confrontation. Calling was what they did; in almost all instances, they stopped there. As I saw it, cowards stayed cowardly.

At three o'clock, I finished the article, emailed it to my editor, and checked Google News in the hope of finding answers to my questions about Fiona's death. What I knew was almost nothing: she'd fallen asleep at the wheel and had a fatal accident. The stories I found provided a few details but no real explanation. The following is typical:

The damn thing about the web – and especially about Google – is that it tantalizes you with the prospect of being able to find out everything and then, just when you think that omniscience is within your grasp, reminds you that even Google can't make you God. So, even if the police had discovered more than was reported in the news, God only knew why Fiona had taken that exit from the highway and why she had smashed her car into a tree and died. Had she felt sick? Or sensed that she was in danger of falling asleep at the wheel? Or been in search of a ladies' room? In any case, although Google had failed to tell me everything, the stories it provided left me with a sharp, painful awareness of the reality of Fiona's death. Furthermore, for the first time, I was hit with the realization that the accident victim could easily have been a member of my own family rather than a member of Vanessa's. Leah, Steve, Buck, Gabrielle, and I all drove back and forth between Cambridge and Maine all the time, and we weren't always careful to do long drives only when we were well rested. Feeling ridiculously vulnerable, I called Leah, listened to her voicemail message, and then called Rita at work and invited her to dinner. I was hoping for her sake that Quinn had apologized and that she'd refuse my invitation because he was taking her out. In fact, she hadn't heard from him since Saturday's fight and sounded happy to accept. When I made lasagne for the three of us, I made a second pan for Vanessa's family. Since lasagne is perishable, you can't leave it on a doorstep, so I called to make sure that someone was home.

Avery answered. When I'd explained the reason for my call, she said, ‘What?'

‘I have a lasagne for you,' I repeated. ‘I wanted to see whether I could drop it off.'

‘Why?'

Although taking food to the bereaved is a little old-fashioned, it isn't freakish. Furthermore, as I reminded myself, when Avery's father had died the previous winter, she must have become familiar with customary responses to a death in the family. Even so, I said, ‘I thought that after Fiona's death, it might help to have food in the house.'

‘We already have food.' Belatedly, she added, ‘But it was nice of you to offer.'

I'd also intended to ask about writing to Hatch and to Fiona's parents, but I didn't feel like listening to Avery's response to a request for addresses. For all I knew, she'd never heard of sympathy notes and would find my intention incomprehensible. I settled for asking to speak to Vanessa, but Avery said that her mother wasn't home. I was heartily glad to have the call end.

‘A barbarian!' I said to Rowdy. ‘And to think that her mother reads Jane Austen.'

SEVEN

O
n Wednesday morning over breakfast, Steve and I talked about Rita, but neither of us could think of a way to help her. At dinner the previous night, she'd done her best to be sociable, but she'd seemed like someone in mourning. All we could do, we decided, was to be with her. Two hours later, when I met Max Crocker, I changed my mind.

As is perhaps needless to say, Max Crocker had not submitted an online application to become the new man in Rita's life. Rather, he had adopted a malamute from a shelter and wanted another as a companion for himself and as a playmate for his dog, a male named Mukluk. I'd claimed his application for two reasons. First, I was the Malamute Rescue volunteer closest to his house, which was in Cambridge. Second, having performed the unpleasant task of turning down the Di Bartolomeos, Irving Jensen, Eldon Flood, and so on, I deserved a reward. Screening Max Crocker's application would constitute what dog trainers call a ‘jackpot', a fantastic treat given for first-rate performance, usually when the dog has completed a whole series of desired behaviors one right after the other. Animal behaviorists will tell you that in dog training, jackpots don't work. Among volunteers for breed-rescue groups, we take positive reinforcement where we find it or where we dole it out to ourselves.

I loved Max's application the minute I read it online, and I continued to love it when I'd printed it out and studied it in detail. Among other things, not only was his yard fenced, but he was concerned that the fence might be insufficiently secure to contain the new malamute he wanted to adopt. Mukluk, he wrote, respected the fence and showed no desire to escape. Would someone from Malamute Rescue be able to take a look at the fence and advise him about its adequacy for a more typical malamute? Would she ever! With few exceptions, the dreadful applicants go on and on about what great dog owners they are and what perfect homes they'll provide; and the perfect applicants express doubts about themselves and ask for advice. Anyway, Max had provided a detailed list of the dogs he'd owned, including a Scottish terrier his family had had when he was a child. The veterinary clinic he gave as reference was in New Haven, Connecticut. I called the number.

‘This is Holly Winter from Malamute Rescue,' I said. ‘One of your clients has applied to adopt a dog, and I'm calling to check the reference.'

‘The client's name?' the woman asked.

‘Max Crocker. The dog is Mukluk. Max also has a cat.'

‘Oh, Mukluk! He's a great dog. We're going to miss him. Max is a wonderful owner. He was in here all the time. He does everything. He goes above and beyond.'

So, to skip ahead, ten o'clock on Wednesday morning found me ringing the bell of Max Crocker's house, which was on a quiet street a few blocks from Fresh Pond Parkway, not far from Huron Avenue and thus not far from where Steve and I live. Like our house, which is the barn-red one at 256 Concord Avenue, Max's had three stories and was made of wood, but his had experienced greater upward social mobility than ours had. Both had started out as unabashedly plebeian. The improvements we'd made on ours, including work I'd done with my own hands, had gentrified it a bit, but Max's showed unmistakable signs of having been transformed by a Henry Higgins of an architect. In place of a plain porch, it had a little deck with natural wood partitions and planter boxes, and the creamy yellow of its facade had jazzy but tasteful details, including wide frames around obviously new windows. The front door was made of a rich, dark wood so exotic that I didn't recognize it. The hardware looked like solid brass.

Mukluk may have been atypical of his breed in respecting the boundary of an iffy fence, but in greeting me by dropping to the floor and rolling over for a tummy rub, he was pure malamute. I was almost certain that he'd originally come from a pet shop, which is to say that he'd been whelped at one of the thousands of puppy mills that breed dogs with less care and compassion than amateur gardeners lavish on their tomato plants. Alternatively, he'd come from a backyard breeder who'd bred one pet-shop dog to another. Like my own three mala-mutes, he was dark gray and white, but he was tremendously tall and rangy, with long, fine-boned legs, a narrow chest, a head that belonged on a collie, and ears that suggested Dumbo in flight. When I'd finished rubbing his white chest, he rose to his feet and greeted me with peals of
woo-woo-woo
so familiar and so heartfelt that I couldn't help laughing.

‘Holly,' the man said. ‘Thank you for coming. Max Crocker. And Mukluk.' Max was a handsome, rugged-looking man who could've modeled for the Orvis catalog. In fact, his charcoal sweater might well have come from Orvis. His short brown hair was shot with gray. He was about five ten, with broad shoulders, and when we shook hands, his grip was firm. He'd said on his application that there was only one member of his household. Even so, with Rita in mind, I checked out the third finger of his left hand and was happy to find it bare. Rita appreciates a clean-shaven, well-dressed man with skilfully trimmed hair and neatly cut nails. Max Crocker was just such a man.

After I'd said the usual things about being glad to meet both of them, I voiced my admiration for Max's house and managed to do so without referring to Rita, who would love the place as much as I did – and would, I vowed, do so at the earliest possible moment, that is, as soon as I could contrive to introduce her to Max. The interior of the house had obviously been gutted and totally redone. The design was simple and open, with floors made of hardwood in the living room and dining room, and smooth stone in the foyer and kitchen. The couches and chairs were leather, a material that stands up well to dogs. Artwork was everywhere: bold paintings and striking photographs on the walls, pieces of stone sculpture in the backyard, the fence that had, alas, been chosen for aesthetics rather than for canine containment.

‘Well, you're right,' I told Max. ‘The typical malamute is going to get under and out of this in seconds.' To Mukluk, who was trailing along with us, I said, ‘You are an exceptionally good boy.'

‘He really is,' Max said. ‘Of course, he's never out here alone. In New Haven, I had a six-foot fence – we just moved here a month ago – and I still didn't leave him out by himself. But from what I understand, he's an exceptionally easy malamute. We've never had a problem with other dogs, including males. And he and the cat are great friends. They both sleep on the bed with me.'