Skinny Dipping (23 page)

She went inside for her car keys, already having made up her mind to drive along the highway. Blondie and Wiley were still snoozing in their respective chairs, completely unconcerned about their lost comrade. Blondie lay on her back, feet dangling in the air. Wiley was curled next to a brown stuffed toy…

Mimi cocked her head, drawing closer. The stuffed toy emitted a little sputtering sound and a big toxic smell.

“Bill?”

The toy opened one eye and regarded her in a bored manner. She reached down and touched his back. He was dry and warm. He’d been in here all the time she’d been wandering through the woods hollering his name.

“Couldn’t you have barked or something when I was screaming for you?” she asked.

This time, he didn’t even open an eye; he just made another smell.

Mimi rolled groggily to a sitting position on the S-shaped couch, put her feet on the ground, and stood up. Her legs buckled and she dropped like a sack of potatoes. Wiley leaned over the edge of the couch and looked down at her.

“My legs are asleep because
you
slept on them,” she told him.

He yawned and disappeared back under the goose-down duvet she’d found in the guest bedroom on the main floor. She probably should have slept there but that would have meant washing bed linens and she didn’t think it was worth the trouble for one or two nights’ sleep. Despite her promise to Prescott to stay here, she’d briefly considered hauling the menagerie down to the Big House, but something in the way Prescott had said, “It makes them act out,” had brought to mind piles of dog poop and puddles of urine on various surfaces, so she’d decided to go the safer course and stay.

She pounded on her thighs until the nerves started firing, then picked herself up and headed into the kitchen anticipating a decent cup of coffee. A place like this was bound to have an expensive brass espresso machine. Maybe one with a steamer. She started opening cupboards.

Ten minutes later, she still hadn’t found an espresso machine, but she had hit the jackpot in the Sub-Zero’s freezer section: individual serving portions of all sorts of expensive and healthful food. This is what these mutts ate? she thought incredulously. It must be, because she distinctly recalled Prescott saying that the dogs’ food was in the freezer and there was a lot of it. And this was the freezer and there was a lot of food. Of course, when you took into account that Prescott was so worried about their little canine psyches that he’d begged her to stay here with them, the portion-controlled gourmet meals made sense. Oh, well. What did she know? She’d never had a dog.

Mimi peeled back the film on a tray of breakfast wraps and popped it in the microwave, humming as she waited. The timer beeped, and Mimi retrieved her breakfast, turned, and promptly stumbled over Bill, who nipped at her ankles but otherwise didn’t move. Were they to spend a lot of time together, she suspected Bill and she were likely to have trouble. Luckily, their time together was bound to be short.

A few feet behind him, Blondie and Wiley wagged their tails hopefully.

“Monkeys first,” Mimi said, heading for the couch. She didn’t bother with utensils. It was incredibly tasty. No wonder Prescott was plump. She’d finished the first wrap with the dogs gathered around her like little furry supplicants at the foot of the throne. She tore the remaining wrap into thirds and tossed the pieces one by one to the dogs.

It turned out that fluffy, sweet Blondie was the athlete. She not only grabbed her piece out of midair but sailed up and over the end of the sofa to intercept the piece Mimi tossed to Wiley. She didn’t try this trick with Bill, however. Both Wiley and Blondie seemed to hold the stocky, elongated, and much smaller little cur in awe.

“Okay,” Mimi announced. “You guys need to go out. But before you do, let’s get one thing straight: we have slept together, so trust has been established. If you don’t come back, you’re on your own. Call when you get work.”

She stood back and opened the door. The dogs charged outside.

Within five minutes, they were back inside.

Mimi waited until nine o’clock to call Fawn Creek Hospital. Like a number of people who had summer homes, Prescott had never bothered to have a landline installed, relying instead on his trusty cell phone service to stay connected. Most people, as soon as they realized that their cell phone service was not trusty, corrected this oversight. Except for the Olsons, who didn’t really care whether they were in touch with the outside world, anyway, or Prescott, who seemed to feel that being without a phone was the last word in roughing it. So, Mimi was stuck counting on the locally spotty cell phone reception. Luckily, today it was decent. Especially out on the deck. She stood shivering by the rail and asked for Prescott Tierney’s room. A moment later a woman answered. “Hello? This is Doctor Youngstrum. May I ask who this is?”

“Mimi Olson.”

“Are you a relative of Mr. Tierney’s, Ms. Olson?”

“No. I’m the, er, dog-sitter,” Mimi said. “How’s Prescott doing? Can I speak to him?”

“That’s not possible. He required orthopedic surgery and was airlifted to Duluth last night.”

“Will he be okay?”

“His condition was stable when he left here and he should be fine.”

Well, that was a relief. “When will he be able to come home? What are we talking about here, a couple days?”

“I think you should assume a while longer than that.”

“A while?” Mimi’s voice rose. “I can’t stay here that long.”

The doctor ignored this. “We’re trying to get in touch with Joe Tierney. Prescott Tierney’s insurance agency has him listed as next of kin, but we haven’t had any luck so far. Do you have a number where he could be reached?”

“No. Can you give me the number of the hospital where Prescott is?”

“Of course,” the doctor replied. “But I doubt he’ll be taking calls until quite a bit later today.”

The day crawled by while Mimi waited for nightfall so she could find out from Prescott just how he intended to handle his dog problem. She didn’t spend it at Prescott’s for the simple fact that if Joe called, which he might, she would feel obliged to answer the phone, and she did not want to talk to him and explain how Prescott had ended up in the hospital, thank you very much. Instead, she trekked over to Chez Ducky for the day. She let the dogs accompany her mostly because she couldn’t think of any reason not to, and besides, she wanted to see how they’d react.

The Big House had warmed up by now, the expanding joints groaning and popping in the walls and ceilings. True to Prescott’s warning, the dogs were not happy about the change of scene. All except Bill, whose savoir faire was unassailable. The other two followed on her heels from room to room, slinking and skulking, their nails tapping against the old floorboards, panting, their heads low as they looked around as though they expected the place to be haunted. Maybe it was.

Thinking it might be worth a shot, she closed her eyes and listened. She didn’t hear anything. Not Ardis, not her grandfather, not Charlie’s long-dead twin, Calvin. Certainly not her father. But she never had found him here. It was odd, she thought, that the only shadow left of John Olson was the one when he’d said good-bye. She opened her eyes to find two pairs of canine eyes regarding her worriedly. Blondie turned and ran to the front door, scratching frantically at it.

“Calm down,” she told her. “You musta chased the big bad spooks away, ’cause we are alone here.”

She lowered the temperature before leaving, the dogs crowding her. Outside, the two larger dogs at once reverted to happy-go-lucky idiots. She threw snowballs at the dogs, which pleased them to no end, and shoveled out the path through the woods between Chez Ducky’s and Prescott’s, thinking that if she was stuck watching the beasties for a few days, she might as well spend some of that time at Chez Ducky.

By the time she was finished, evening was closing in, so she went back to Prescott’s to warm up and eat dinner. She got out the deep-dish pizza she’d spotted in the freezer that morning and stuck it in the oven. When it was done, she cut it into quarters and set each portion on one of the stoneware plates, placed three on the floor, and called, “Num-nums!”

The dogs appeared, looked at the plates on the floor, and looked back at her. If dog faces could look stunned, these did.

“Look. I want pizza, so pizza it is. Until you guys grow opposable thumbs, them’s the rules. The biped gets to choose,” she told them. “Eat.”

Bill pushed past his two larger companions and picked up one of the pizza slabs. He gobbled it, his gaze hard on Mimi as though he expected her to change her mind at any minute. Blondie and Wiley, needing no further urging than Bill’s example, dove toward the other two plates, feet skittering on the floor.

Good
, Mimi thought. They liked pizza. There were three more in the freezer.

She finished her own piece, washing it down with a bottle of designer water, and then wrapped herself in the down-filled duvet she’d used the previous night before heading back outside onto the deck. Once again, she was in luck; her cell phone worked.

“Hello?” Prescott answered on the eighth ring. He sounded dopey.

“Prescott, this is Mimi Olson.”

There was a long pause punctuated by throaty breathing. He was snoring.

“Prescott!” she yelled into the phone.

“Huh? Wha—?”

“Prescott, this is Mimi Olson. From Fowl Lake? I’m at your house with your dogs.” She spoke each sentence loudly and clearly.

“Mrs. Olson!” Prescott cried. He really cried. She heard the sob. “You’re all right? You’re not dead?”

“No. Don’t you remember? I was making a snow angel. You thought I was having a fit and called the ambulance.”

He thought about this. “Yeah. You were dying. You were flopping around on the ice. Woman your age, flopping around outside in the middle of the night.” His voice was slurred, the volume moving up and down at random. Stoned out of his mind. “Flopping.”

“Yeah, yeah. I get the image. But I’m not dead or dying.”

“Flopping like a fish.”

“Prescott, I’m here with your dogs. You asked me to watch them while you were in the hospital.”

“Billy? You’re with Billy?” Prescott’s voice filled with jubilation. “Kiss Billy for me. I miss Billy. I love Billy. Kiss Billy,” he insisted.

Mimi looked through the glass doors into the lodge’s interior. Billy was sitting in the center of the scarlet sofa, licking himself. “Okay. I kissed him.”

“And Merry and Sammy? Kiss them, too.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. Kisses all around. We gotta talk, Prescott.”

“Are they adorable?”

“The bee’s knees. What are you going to do about them?”

“Love ’em,” he slurred without hesitation. “Love ’em, lead ’em. That’s all a dog wants. To know his place and be accepted in it. In’t that what we all want?”

Great, a stoned agoraphobic was pontificating to her.

“That’s fine, Prescott. But I was speaking in the specific here. I can’t stay with your dogs. I got stuff to do.” It was a small lie. So what? “What are you going to do about them, and when?”

“Huh?”

“I assume you do not want the dogs left alone,” she said, speaking slowly. “What plans are you going to make for their care?”

He was silent for so long that Mimi thought he might have fallen asleep again, but then he said, “I dunno.”

Mimi tried again. “Who is going to watch them?”

“I dunno!” he said, sounding harassed. “I don’t know anyone up there. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Why can’t you stay? I saved your life.”

“You
did
not—” She let it slide. “I can’t stay. I have things to do.”

“Like what?”

“Things. Like enjoy being by myself.”

Like she hadn’t done enough of that in her life.
The sarcastic internal came out of left field, catching her off guard. She frowned.

“Well, I can’t help you.
I’m in the hospital
,” he said. “But I got plenty of money, so I can pay you—”

“I don’t want your money. I want to go back to Chez Ducky.”

He sighed. “Okay. They won’t like it, and Blondie will cry, and maybe wet a few times, but if you have to, you can take ’em with ya.”

“I don’t want them in Chez Ducky. I want to be
alone
in Chez Ducky.” She paused, half expecting another nasty internal editorial comment. None came. “That is why I came up here
alone.
”

“Well, I can’t help you,” Prescott repeated in the tone of a salesman speaking to an unreasonable customer.

“What about your dad?” Mimi asked.

“What about him?”

“Did anyone get hold of him? Can he come and stay?”

“Are you kidding?” Prescott sounded irritable. “The dogs’d hate him. And he’d hate them. I don’t even know where my father is.”

“Join the club,” Mimi murmured, thinking of John. “Didn’t he call you? Does he know you’ve broken your leg?”

“Joe? Yeah, I think so. I sort of remember talking to him. Doesn’t matter. I don’t want him….” Prescott trailed off then came back abruptly. “I know. Hire someone. I’ll pay ’em. But make sure they like dogs.”

Good idea, but it was too late to start calling people this evening. She gave up. Fate had apparently decreed that she would spend another night on Prescott’s couch. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks…
Mignonette
,” he slid her name in with a slyness that almost made her laugh.

“Sure,
Prescott
. I’ll let you know if I arrange something.”

“’Kay. I’m glad you’re not dead.”

Mimi glanced inside the lodge. All three dogs were now cleaning themselves. One of them would lick her face tonight while she slept. She just knew it.

“Thanks,” she muttered.

“Get off me,” Mimi said, shoving Wiley off her lap the next morning. Blondie appeared from under the blanket at the foot of the sofa. Somewhere, Bill made a smell.

By nine o’clock, when she figured most of the Fawn Creek businesses would open, she was wrapped in the down duvet, sitting on the deck overlooking the lake, the thin Fawn Creek phone book open on her lap. She started punching buttons.

By nine thirty she’d called every person who might possibly be willing to house-sit a trio of dogs or know of someone who would. The town boasted two kennels, but both were closed for the season. The veterinary clinic sometimes took in boarders, but its six in-house kennels were currently filled. From the community center to church offices, from the Fawn Creek Shopper Advertising Circular office to Smelka’s restaurant to the VFW, nowhere was a dog-sitter to be found.

Mimi punched the
END CALL
button in a daze of disbelief. Fawn Creek was not a rich community. It did okay in the summer, but during the winters those locals who didn’t light out for warmer climes must be scraping by. Yet, she couldn’t find one responsible, honest, and dog-loving person willing to compromise his or her independence for cold, hard cash. And while in theory she applauded this stand-alone attitude, practically, at least for her, it sucked.