Ruff Way to Go (10 page)

Susan came
back into the room and immediately removed the crystal from the window, reaching
it with no trouble. The show off. She laid it on the dirty sill and turned
toward me with a furrowed brow. “So this explains why there’s all the scratch
marks on the wall. I never realized that’s what Boris was doing.” Susan gave me
a visual once over, her hands on her hips. “How did you know that he’s a
schipperke?”

“I’m
familiar with most breeds. I’m a dog behaviorist.”

“A
behaviorist?” She snorted. “Is that some glorified term that lets you charge
more for working as a dog trainer?”

I waited a
moment to keep from blasting her for her snide remark, then explained calmly, “Dog
trainers do just that— basic obedience training. I specialize in dog
behavior problems, which sometimes includes their inability to follow
instructions.”

“Huh. Well,
I gotta say, I could sure use your services, if only I could afford them. Boris
isn’t trained yet. We only got him a couple weeks ago. He barks like mad at
everybody who comes to the house and seems to think he owns the place. We have
to keep him out in the yard a lot, but then he barks and bugs the neighbors.”

“Come on,
Boris!” a little voice called. The girl raced through the living room, giggling
as the much faster Boris did his best to stay behind her and interpret the
rules to this game.

“You know, I’ve
got to say right off the bat that rambunctious, untrained dogs and toddlers don’t
mix well.”

“Ah, I’m not
worried.” She flicked her wrist in the direction the girl had run. “She ain’t
my kid. I’m just doing day care for a neighbor. See, I lost my job and I’m
trying to scrape together some money to help ends meet.” She chuckled, but the
sound was bitter. “I wasn’t kidding when I told you that I couldn’t afford to
hire you.”

“Does your
husband work?”

“Oh, sure.”
The color rose in her cheeks. “He’s a real hard worker. He’s a contractor, you
know, for carpentry, that sort of thing. It’s just that that’s a hot-or-cold
kind of business.”

“So is any
self-run business.” My clients also tended to come in clusters.

My mind
raced as to how I could work the conversation around to paw prints. “Funny that
I never noticed you over there in the past few weeks, but I guess you can’t
really see much of your parents’ property from my mom’s place. Do you bring
your dog along when you go over there?”

“Sometimes.
Why? Did you see him running around on your property?”

“No, I’d
have noticed him, for sure,” I said with sincere admiration as he deserted the
girl and returned to the living room to bark at me. Boris was a bright-eyed,
healthy-looking dog. “What about yesterday?”

“What do you
mean?”

“Was Boris
at your parents’ place with you yesterday?”

She
shrugged, but was now watching me with a wariness that matched her dog’s. “Why
do you ask?”

“There were
some paw prints that I was curious about, that’s all.”

“Paw prints?
You mean, in the blood or something?” Her eyes lit up, and I got the impression
that she was calculating how she could gain personally from this information.

Her
assumption that the paw prints had been made by the blood was not such a big
leap as to implicate her, I decided. “No, nothing as dramatic as all of that.
The...Cunninghams’ dog is missing and I’m trying to help them locate him.”

Having
tired, finally, of keeping an eye on me, Boris searched the wall for another
rainbow and, not finding one, snatched up a sock that he’d found wadded up in
the corner and dashed in a circular path through the house, seeing if anyone
would give chase.

“That’s it,”
Susan said with a sigh. “Time to move this kit ‘n’ caboodle outdoors.”

Fortunately,
for I still hoped to glean information from her, Susan hadn’t called me on my
earlier excuse that I could only stay a moment I silently followed her into the
kitchen.

“Come on,
Chelsea. Want something to eat?”

The child
nodded, and Susan grabbed a lunch box off the counter and we all headed to the
backyard, which was spacious and lovely. The lawn and gardens were in
considerably nicer condition than the house. A garden on the incline of the
side yard had tiers built with railroad ties and layers of hundreds of
beautiful irises that must have come from Long’s Gardens, a world-renowned
seller of iris bulbs in north Boulder that had been in existence for longer
than I’d been.

I brought
out the piece of magenta-colored paper in my
pocket and showed it to
Susan, who was seated on the redwood picnic table bench across from the little
girl. “Your parents gave me this note. Is it from your notepad?”

She gave me
an all-too-familiar-looking sneer. “No. Why all would you want to know?”

Not wanting
to divulge my true reason for asking, I felt my cheeks warm and offered a
feeble explanation. “I was just trying to find out whose notepad it was. It
didn’t look like your parents’ typical color scheme.”

She
shrugged. “My dad, probably—” She stopped, then said abruptly, “It isn’t
mine. Didn’t you say earlier you could only stay for a moment?”

She was
suddenly hostile, either because I’d annoyed her or because the subject matter
made her tense. “Yes, I do have an appointment at noon. I’d better be going.”
While we spoke, the dog tore around the yard, chasing a butterfly. “Boris must
be, what, ten months old?”

“A little
over nine months. How’d you know?”

“He’s
approaching his adolescent phase.”

She snorted.
“Runs in the family. My husband’s stuck in his adolescence.”

Based on my
desire to work with a schipperke, combined with the thought that my suspicions
about Susan and her parents might be best resolved by getting to know her
better, I tried to think of how to offer a trade of services. I couldn’t think
of any particular construction projects that I had going at the moment, and
having seen the condition of their house, I had doubts as to how motivated her
husband really was. “So you take care of your parents’ lawn?”

“Yeah.”

“If you do
decide you’d like me to work with Boris, maybe we can trade services. My mom’s
been talking about hiring out the job of mowing for a while now. Maybe we could
work out some sort of equitable arrangement.”

Boris tore
through the yard and crashed into the glass door, apparently not realizing it
was shut. He yelped then raced back toward us. Before any of us could move, he
leapt onto the picnic table, snatched the girl’s sandwich right off her plate,
and dashed off. The little girl, in the meantime, burst into wailing sobs,
pointing at the dog.

Susan turned
toward me as she rose to console the child. “How soon could you start?”

We set an
appointment for the next day, and I left for my house visit in Boulder. I often
go to the dog’s residence, though sometimes, depending on factors such as the
particular behavioral problem, the dogs are brought to my office. I charge more
for the house visits, and they are usually much more advantageous for the dogs
and their owners.

Maggie, my
client, was a gorgeous, albeit exuberant, golden retriever. I’d grown up with a
houseful of goldens, so they were one of my favorite types of
dogs—although my list of favorites often seems to correspond with
whatever type of dog I happen to be with at the moment.

This
particular golden had become a hoarder of unreasonable proportions. She was “burying”
her things—chew toys, rawhide bones, and other items she’d decided she
wanted for herself, such as her masters’ shoes—in all sorts of inconvenient
locations in the house. She was then constantly either scratching up the doors
in pursuit of her various “bones,” or trying to defend them from anyone else
touching them.

The burying
instinct can be a very difficult one to overcome. To
not
bury bones goes
against the innate survival instincts that dogs are born with. Owners can opt
to have me help train the dog to use acceptable limits, such as burying bones
only in certain areas of the property. However, prior to my being hired, Maggie’s
owners had put an end to all digging, which Maggie had translated to mean “no
digging
outside.”

My advice to
Maggie’s owners had been to spritz Bitter Apple on their shoes, take away her
toys and put them out of her reach, and give her only one item to play with at
a time. When playtime was over, they would immediately collect her one toy,
regardless of whether or not she’d “buried” it. This regimen makes it very
clear to the dog that the human owners and not the dog itself are in charge of
the various belongings.

We had been
in the intermediate stages of the behavior modification regimen, which meant
that Maggie was spending quite a bit of time whining at the base of the
refrigerator, staring up at her box of toys with forlorn eyes. The owners were
already discouraged. They had decided that they didn’t want to indefinitely
maintain the practice of having to limit her toys to one at a time. Instead,
the final stage of Maggie’s training, which we were now dabbling in, was to
teach her to return her own toys to one location. Dogs can actually be trained
to pick up after themselves in this manner, which makes for a nice parlor trick.

During this
session, I had Maggie’s owner bring down the box of her toys in my presence.
Poor Maggie acted overjoyed and, as I’d fortunately forewarned, immediately set
about laying claim to the rooms of the house by spreading out her things.
Naturally, we had to do repeated fetching and returning of the toys to the box,
until she gradually got the idea. Though I never admit this to my clients, the
truth is, I appreciate these more stubborn canines. The eager-to-please and
quick-to-learn ones mean fewer repeat sessions, and I charge by the hour.

Afterward, I
drove to south Boulder to meet with an obstinate poodle that didn’t tolerate
strangers in the house. The owner’s grandchildren were coming for a visit next
month. This was a matter of getting the poodle to make more reasonable
concessions on where his particular turf boundaries were. I was working on
reducing the boundaries until they were defined as his dog bed and the
immediate perimeter.

Once the
poodle appointment was finished, I drove to my office, anxious to see Russell.
The building we were in was a two-and-a-half story limestone structure on the
corner of Ninth and Mapleton, just north of the Pearl Street Mall. We were in
the half story, a walk-out basement built into the steep incline. Though real
estate agents would call this location “nestled in the foothills,” our view
through the small windows just below the ceiling went no higher than the ankles
of sidewalk pedestrians. Russell didn’t need two full rooms and had given me
the front room, so that he and his clients had to go through my office to get
to his. The access to the bathroom was through his office, so it was something
of a trade-off.

His car was
parked in the two-car parking lot that came with the rental, and I immediately
got butterflies in my stomach at the prospect of seeing him. However, as soon
as I went inside, the deep murmurings through our common wall told me that he
was with a couple of male clients. Russell is a contract electrical engineer,
so from my vantage point, this was likely deadly dull stuff they were
discussing.

My thoughts
soon turned to the missing Shogun. If Trevor or Edith had had any luck finding
Shogun, they surely would have contacted me by now. Nevertheless, I decided to
call them and share my concern. I dialed Edith’s house, but there was no
answer. I called Trevor, thinking I had no chance of finding him, that he’d be
at work. To my surprise, he answered.

Trevor began
by telling me that Shogun still hadn’t surfaced and that he was “really
worried.” Oddly, he didn’t sound even remotely worried, in contrast to his
behavior last evening, and yet the dog had now been missing for almost
twenty-four hours.

“I’m so
sorry to hear that, Trevor. My mother and I haven’t seen him in the
neighborhood at all. I was thinking that, since your sister raised Shogun, he
might have gone there. Where does your sister live?”

“Oh, uh, she
lives...way north in Campion.”

That was
odd. He’d said it as if she lived in North Dakota, and yet Campion was closer
to Berthoud than Longmont, where Trevor lived. “I’d like to speak with her. I’m
trying to introduce myself to dog breeders in the area to help my business
anyway, and it might be helpful for me to talk with her about Shogun.”

“Why would
you want to do that?” he snapped. For some reason, Trevor sounded affronted at
my suggestion.

“When I last
saw Shogun, he was acting more high strung than usual. Sometimes it’s helpful
to talk to the breeder to get the full background on a dog. And I’d also like
to be sure to enlist your sister’s help in finding him.” Furthermore, though I
didn’t want to come out and say it, I was afraid that Shogun might have run
away after all, and if those prints in the blood were his, he could be badly
traumatized.

“Oh. I see.
That makes sense, except she hasn’t kept up with Shogun enough for him to know
where she lives. She and Edith don’t get along, you see, so she practically
never visited.”