Paws before dying

ON THE TRAIL OF A KILLER?

“Which way, boy?” I asked confidently, but felt as though I might as well have flipped a coin. He hadn’t been taught to track. I’d meant to do it someday. I’d been busy. I’d been lazy. Rowdy would choose a path for us, of course, but he might head us directly toward the backyard hutch of some family’s pet rabbits or take us to the nearest bitch in season...

Praise for Susan Conant’s Dog Lover’s Mysteries...

PAWS BEFORE DYING: “Superb... Beautifully written and plotted!” —Carolyn G. Hart, author of the prize-winning
Death on Demand
series

DEAD AND DOGGONE:
“Dead and Doggone
reminds me of my first dog... Sasha was a little dog, but she had a big, brave soul. She made me laugh, she taught me a lot, and she broke my heart. This book is like that. I’d award it Top Dog Honors!” —Nancy Pickard

A NEW LEASH ON DEATH: “Susan Conant deserves high praise... delightful characters... [an] enjoyable mystery!”

—
Kate's Mystery Books Newsletter

MORE MYSTERIES FROM THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP…

DOG LOVERS' MYSTERIES STARRING HOLLY WINTER
:
With her Alaskan malamute Rowdy, Holly dogs the trails of dangerous criminals. “A gifted and original writer.” —Carolyn G. Hart

by Susan Conant

A NEW LEASH ON DEATH    A BITE OF DEATH  DEAD AND DOGGONE           PAWS BEFORE DYING

DOG LOVERS’MYSTERIES STARRING JACKIE WALSH
:
She’s starting a new life with her son and an ex-police dog named Jake... teaching film classes and solving crimes!

by Melissa Cleary

A TAIL OF TWO MURDERS    FIRST PEDIGREE MURDER    THE MALTESE PUPPY

DOG COLLAR CRIME               SKULL AND DOG BONES       MURDER MOST BEASTLY

HOUNDED TO DEATH            DEAD AND BURIED                  OLD DOGS

SAMANTHA HOLT MYSTERIES
:
Dogs, cats, and crooks are all part of a day’s work for this veterinary technician... “Delightful!” -Melissa Cleary

by Karen Ann Wilson

EIGHT DOG FLYING                 COPY CAT CRIMES

BEWARE SLEEPING DOGS     CIRCLE OF WOLVES

CHARLOTTE GRAHAM MYSTERIES
:
She’s an actress with a flair for dramatics—and an eye for detection. “You’ll get hooked on Charlotte Graham!”

—Rave Reviews

by Stefanie Matteson

MURDER AT THE SPA             MURDER AT THE FALLS

MURDER AT TEATIME            MURDER ON HIGH

MURDER ON THE CLIFF         MURDER AMONG THE ANGELS

MURDER ON THE SILK ROAD                 MURDER UNDER THE PALMS

PEACHES DANN MYSTERIES
:
Peaches has never had a very good memory. But she’s learned to cope with it over the years... Fortunately, though, when it comes to murder, this absentminded amateur sleuth doesn’t forgive and forget!

by Elizabeth Daniels Squire

WHO KILLED WHAT’S-HER-NAME?    REMEMBER THE ALIBI

MEMORY CAN BE MURDER WHOSE DEATH IS IT, ANYWAY?

HEMLOCK FALLS MYSTERIES
:
The Quilliam sisters combine their culinary and business skills to run an inn in upstate New York. But when it comes to murder, their talent for detection takes over...

by Claudia Bishop

A TASTE FOR MURDER           A DASH OF DEATH

A PINCH OF POISON                MURDER WELL-DONE

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This Berkley Prime Crime Book contains the complete text of the original edition.

PAWS BEFORE DYING

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Diamond edition / August 1991

Berkley Prime Crime edition / December 1993

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1991 by Susan Conant.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

ISBN: 0-425-14430-5

Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks of Berkley Publishing Corporation.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

To Vivian Carter Umbarger

In memory of

Her coyte-dog hybrid

Rowdy.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Joel Woolfson, D.V.M., and William Walker, D.V.M., for advice about this book as well as for their care of my beloved Alaskan malamutes, Frostfield Arctic Natasha, C.D., and Frostfield Firestar’s Kobuk.

Author's Note

Several canine characters in the book are based on real dogs, including my own, but all actual institutions and locales are used fictionally.

Chapter 1

ACCORDING to family legend, allergies were the excuse my Aunt Cassie and her husband, Arthur, gave for failing to attend my parents’ wedding. My mother, though, believed that the real reason they skipped it was fear: Arthur harbored an inborn terror of life itself, Marissa always argued. You might suppose that she referred to some aversion to the symbolic significance of nuptials, but she didn’t. She meant that Arthur was afraid of dogs.

Arthur and Cassie’s absence from my parents’ wedding pictures, though, is somewhat less striking than is the presence in portrait after portrait of six or eight members of the bridal party, which, with the exception of my parents themselves, consisted entirely of golden retrievers. The highlight of the ceremony occurred as my mother marched down the aisle preceded by a flower girl who bore a basket of orange blossoms in her mouth and an usher whose task it was to thrust his muzzle into the basket and strew jawfuls of petals on his trainer’s route to holy matrimony. Marissa, I believe, forgave her sister for forgoing the exchange of vows but not for missing the sight of that perfect brace in action.

The dogs’ performance did not, however, pass unnoticed or unrewarded. After joining my parents in wedlock, the minister presented large white ribbons to the attendants. He had the authority to make the awards, of course; he was—and still is—ordained by the American Kennel Club as well as by the Episcopal church. My father, in fact, insists that Dr. Hooper performed the wedding itself in his capacity as an AKC obedience judge and that his affiliation with a secondary religious organization was incidental.

Cassie and Arthur sent nothing at all when I was born, probably because the birth announcement, designed by my sire and dam, took the form of a pink premium list for a golden retriever specialty show. Cassie probably thought that Marissa’s mail had reached her by mistake, or else Arthur opened the envelope, succumbed to a dander-driven sneezing fit, and discarded the announcement unread. More likely, Cassie and Arthur simply failed to realize that the new puppy bitch was human. It’s not their fault. My name is Holly Winter.

My aunt and her husband, then, can’t be blamed for missing the point of my birth announcement, nor can my parents really be held responsible for their difficulty in deciphering my cousin Leah’s, which we received when I was about sixteen. Unlike all previous birth announcements sent by Buck and Marissa’s friends and family, this one was not headed: “Litterbox News” or “Something to Howl About.” They were also puzzled about why the new owners had failed to specify Leah’s breed. Marissa, though, rationalized her sister’s slip: If the breed went without saying, Cassie’s pup was assuredly a golden retriever.

Because of subsequent bad feeling between our families, as well as Arthur’s allergies, I saw almost nothing of Leah during her puppyhood and do not know whether she enjoyed retrieving the special imported English hard-rubber, chew-proof balls sent by my mother together with a typewritten list of tips on house training. Even when Marissa died and Cassie was obviously grieved—and probably sorry she’d missed the wedding—Buck didn’t forgive her or Arthur, because he still considered them poor sports and moral weaklings for having violated Section 24 of the AKC obedience regulations: “Dogs must compete.”

In fact, before Leah moved in with me, I hadn’t seen her for about ten years, not only because Buck stopped sending whelping announcements to her parents after my mother died but also because Leah’s family had left Boston for a small college town in central Maine, and I’d meanwhile left Maine, gone to college, and moved to Cambridge. It must have been my grandmother who first told them that I live here. Although my editor includes a little biographical information with my column, something tells me that Arthur and Cassie don’t subscribe to
Dog's Life
magazine and seldom even pick it up at the newsstand.

Partly because Cassie’s voice sounds remarkably like Marissa’s, especially over the phone, her rare calls always startle me.

My mother is often with me, but when she speaks in my ear, I usually recognize the source as internal. Besides, I’m always stunned to hear my mother’s voice discussing any topic except dogs, and Cassie usually drones on about people, including Arthur and Leah. One of the joys of dog ownership is liberation from the boring self-centeredness to which Cassie’s loveless marriage has doomed her, or so said Marissa, to whom a loveless marriage was any union not blessed with canine progeny.

As my mother would wish, then, I pity Cassie and listen to her blather on. I even phone her once in a while, and we exchange Christmas cards. Last year, for instance, my card showed a breathtaking color photograph of Rowdy, one of my two Alaskan malamutes, in his new red harness, pulling a sled across the snow-covered lawn at Owls Head, where my father still lives. Rowdy’s big color-coordinated red tongue is hanging out, he’s smiling, and especially in harness, he doesn’t really look much like a wolf. Because of the snow, you can’t see that the lawn isn’t a proper lawn anymore, and neither Buck nor his wolf hybrids appear in the picture. In other words, I do my best to introduce life and love into what my mother called Cassie’s blighted existence, which is probably why she felt free to phone me one May evening to ask whether I would keep Leah for the summer.

Arthur, it seemed, had obtained some frivolous grant that would pay him to gallivant around Europe under the pretense of conducting scholarly research, and although he had managed to include Cassie as a boondoggling research assistant, Leah couldn’t go unless he paid her way. Cassie didn’t phrase it quite like that. She didn’t have to.

“In any event,” Cassie added in my mother’s voice, “she needs to study for her SATs.” She paused. “Scholastic Aptitude Tests.”