Whom Dog Hath Joined (2 page)

We handled the backlog of customers quickly and Gail slumped
into the chair next to me. “I’ve been up since five this morning, baking
chocolate bars, cutting them and stacking them on trays,” she said. “At seven,
I met Ginny here and we set up the booth. She went home about an hour ago and
it’s been a zoo ever since.”

I leaned forward and discovered that if I pressed
too hard on the table the chocolate bars went slip-sliding toward Mrs. Holt’s adjoining
table of crocheted pink and lavender toilet paper covers topped by Barbie
knock-offs. They were a shocking example of what happened when people with too
much time on their hands possessed the deluded notion that they had some
artistic talent, but she had bought two chocolate bars so I was willing to cut
her a little slack.

“We sure need some good food in Stewart’s Crossing,” said
a young mom with twins in a double stroller.

I took her money and told her the café sold terrific
take-out sandwiches in kid-friendly flavors like meatballs and grilled cheese
as well as desserts.

Then I heard a scream.

I reached down below the table to grab Rochester’s leash and
keep him from tearing off toward the sound. But he was already gone.

“Oh, crap,” I said, jumping up.

“You both go,” Gail said. “I can handle things until my
mother gets here.”

“Where do you think he is?” Lili asked, taking off the apron
she’d been wearing. The silver bangle bracelets on her arm jingled.

“Wherever that scream came from,” I said.

I darted around slow-moving elderly people, parents grabbing
dilly-dallying little kids, and curious folks headed toward the Meeting House. The
scatter of gold and orange leaves crunched beneath my feet, mixing with distant
car horns and the sound of someone sobbing.

The big white double doors at the center of the building
stood open, and a walkway along the front of the building was lined with piles
of osage oranges and green and white gourds. The three-part slate roof—peaked
in the center, flat on the sides—was dusted with a covering of red and gold
leaves.

A crowd had already gathered outside the right side of the
building, the part with no windows. A teenaged girl huddled against her mother,
crying. “She was just trying to pet the dog,” the woman was saying to others in
the crowd. “And then she saw what he was digging, and she screamed.”

Others were watching my determined golden, who tugged at the
something near the foundation. An elderly man was trying, without result, to
talk Rochester away, but he looked too timid to touch the dog himself.

Up close I could see the wood of the exterior wall was
disintegrating, with long vertical cracks through the planks. I pushed forward,
excusing myself and calling Rochester’s name. When I reached him, I grabbed his
collar and lifted his head away from where he had been digging, and saw that
he’d dragged a disintegrating tennis shoe through the gap.

A single bone, like the one I filled with peanut butter for him,
remained, sticking out of the shoe. Only this bone wasn’t the kind sold at pet
stores.

“Rochester, this has to stop!” I scolded. “No more digging
up dead bodies.”

2 – Death Dog

Rochester had led me to three dead bodies in the short time
we had been together, and I remembered each one. His original mom, Caroline,
lying on a dirt road at the edge of River Bend, her blood spilled around her.
My mentor when I was a student, Joe Dagorian, murdered during a fund-raising
event on the campus of Eastern College, where I worked. And a couple of months
before, Rochester had dug up a hand from a shallow grave on the grounds of
Friar Lake, a college property I was in charge of developing into a conference
center.

In each case, I felt an immediate burst of horror, as I
realized a life had been snuffed out. Pulse racing, stomach churning,
scratchiness in my throat. Childhood funerals in the back of unfamiliar
synagogues, women crying, my father placing the first shovel of dirt on my
mother’s coffin.

But dogs don’t have the same emotional connection to the
dead, and I had learned my first responsibility was to keep Rochester from
disturbing the site. I hooked up his leash and tugged him away from the wall.

Lili joined me, holding her camera. She had seen so much
death and destruction in the course of her journalism work that she had learned
to use the lens to distance herself from it. I wished I could do the same.

I pulled out my cell phone and called my high-school buddy
Rick Stemper, a detective with the Stewart’s Crossing Police Department.

“Don’t tell me,” he said, when he answered.

“I won’t.”

I heard him sigh. “You’re at Harvest Days, aren’t you,
Steve?”

“Yup. Did you already get called?”

“Yeah. Lucky me. Any chance the bone he dug up isn’t human?”

“Not unless cows have started wearing Converse.”

“I’m on my way. Keep the dog away from the remains, all
right?”

“Easier said than done,” I said, holding tightly to
Rochester’s collar while keeping the phone between my shoulder and my head. My
body stress mirrored my emotional tension, as I multi-tasked on behalf of the
dead.

“I’ll be there in ten,” he said, and hung up.

A little boy scooted past and ran toward the sneaker. Lili quickly
scooped him up and whispered into his ear. He stopped squawking and smiled,
grabbing a handful of her curls. Though she had no children of her own, she had
an instinct for kids, perhaps after all those years of comforting them in war
zones.

She handed the boy off to his mother and stepped in front of
the Meeting House wall to address the crowd as people murmured. “The police
have been called,” she announced. “Would everyone please stay back until they
get here, and not touch anything?”

With Lili taking charge, my mind was free to roam, and I
remembered the first time I’d been in the Meeting House, when I was in the
eighth grade. My social studies teacher, Mrs. Shea, was a Quaker, and she’d
invited our class to join her at the Stewart’s Crossing Meeting one Sunday. She
warned us in advance that it wouldn’t be very exciting, that most of the time
people were silent and contemplative, and that convinced the hyperactive kids
in my class to opt out.

Not me, though. I was accustomed to dull services, because I
grew up going to a Reform Jewish congregation in Trenton, across the Delaware
from Stewart’s Crossing. Despite the beauty of the soaring Byzantine-style
temple and the mystery of the curtained choir loft behind the bema, the
elevated platform where the rabbi and cantor sat, I was frequently bored during
services, especially when the cantor sung something in Hebrew that the rabbi
had just read. The repetition seemed so inefficient to me, especially since I
didn’t understand either rendition.

I went to Sunday school from the time I was in kindergarten
all the way through Confirmation in tenth grade. Joining Mrs. Shea and her
congregation was a chance to skip a day’s class and experience something different,
more American than our foreign-language prayers, white silk prayer shawls,
rainbow of yarmulkes, hand-crocheted, bought in the Holy Land, or souvenirs of
a distant cousin’s bat mitzvah.

The contemplative nature of the service stayed with me. I
hadn’t been to a Quaker Meeting since, but I associated the Stewart’s Crossing
Meeting with that sense of stillness and peace. It was so different from the
hubbub all around us, as it looked like everyone I’d noticed at the Harvest
Festival was gathering there. I held tight to Rochester’s leash as an
attractive woman in her early thirties hurried toward us.

“Is there a problem here?” she asked. She was wearing the
standard costume of a suburban mom: a plaid blouse that tied around her waist,
hot pink pedal pushers, and matching pink sneakers. She also wore a round
button that said, “I’m a Quaker! Ask me about our worship.”

Her blonde ponytail was cinched with a pink scrunchie and
she had a small blond boy by the hand. “What’s everyone looking at?”

The crowd had obeyed Lili’s request to stay back, but that
didn’t prevent them from craning their necks and looking around each other,
trying to get a clearer view.

“You don’t want to take your little boy any closer,” I said.
“The police are on their way.”

“Police? Why? What’s happened?” She looked from us to the
Meeting and then back. “I’m Hannah Palmer. I’m the clerk of the Meeting.” From
my studies with Mrs. Shea, way back when, I knew that meant she was the
volunteer responsible for administrative functions. “Why are the police
coming?”

“Steve Levitan,” I said. “This is Lili Weinstock, and the
big dog is Rochester. I’m afraid he might have disturbed your construction
area. He found a disintegrating tennis shoe. And it looks like there’s a human
bone inside.”

“Oh, how awful! Just one bone?” She shivered. “Or is it a
whole skeleton?” She frowned. “You’re sure it’s not some prankster getting
ready for Halloween?”

“All we can see is the sneaker,” I said. “It doesn’t look
like a prank, though.”

Her hand was shaking as she pulled a walkie-talkie from the
pocket of her pink slacks and pressed a key, then spoke. “This is Hannah, and I
need help at the front lawn. Any volunteer who’s not in the middle of
something, please come up here right away.”

She slipped the walkie-talkie back in her pocket. “I’ll get
some of our members to help with crowd control,” she said. “The building wasn’t
even supposed to be opened up now. We haven’t raised all the money we need, but
after the last couple of weeks of rain, our contractor thought he’d get a head
start on the renovation while the weather was fair, without realizing that we
had Harvest Days upcoming.”

Close up I could see the tell-tale signs that contractors
had passed that way – ruts in the grass, paper building permit in a plastic
sleeve by the front door, stockpile of stone by the side wall. But there was no
evidence that any of them were there that day.

The little boy tugged on my pant leg and asked, “Can I pet
your dog?”

“Nathaniel, not now,” Hannah said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Rochester, sit.”

He plopped his golden butt down on the thin grass of the
front lawn, and the boy held out his hand for Rochester to lick. “Nathaniel
wants a dog,” Hannah said. “I’m afraid he gets very excited whenever he sees
one.”

Well, for a long time I had wanted a child, I thought. After
my ex-wife had two miscarriages I had accepted that we don’t always get what we
want. It was the way of life; this little boy would endure disappointments
small and large (there’s no more ice cream, you can’t have a car just because
you got your driver’s license, broken heart and failure of ambition.) And he
would survive, if he was lucky.

Hannah, Lili and I stood around awkwardly as Nathaniel
petted Rochester, until a group of people converged on us, all of them wearing
the same “I’m a Quaker” buttons, and Hannah stepped aside to speak with them,
taking Nathaniel with her. He cast one longing glance back, like Lot’s wife
leaving Sodom or Orpheus unable to resist checking for Eurydice and something
in his plaintive look made my heart twang. The discovery of the body must have
upset me more than I realized.

“I want to take some pictures for Rick,” Lili said. “I won’t
disturb anything but I can get better shots than he could with his phone or
whatever little camera he has. I’ll be back.”

She moved closer to the Meeting House and began snapping
shots. I followed her, still holding Rochester at bay, and noted that the
summer rains, in conjunction with the reconstruction, had eroded the wood where
the building’s exterior wall met its foundation. Fresh scratch marks indicated
where Rochester had moved away the dirt to reveal the shoe behind the
disintegrating wall. It was like peeling the surface of the world away to see
the rot and heartbreak beneath it.

All I could see was the sneaker and the whitened bone
sticking out of it, but I was almost certain there had to be a body behind it.
Lili leaned forward, crouched down, fiddled with her lenses. I could see her
professionalism and her experience in tough situations in every action.

A pair of uniformed officers came through the crowd, the
community’s protection against the darkness always around us, and took over
from the volunteers Hannah Palmer had arranged in a cordon around the Meeting
House. Lili explained to them what she was doing, and they left her alone. One officer
began to lay out yellow crime scene tape, our modern ritual of creating a
sacred space, an ephemeral Stonehenge that wouldn’t last more than a day. The
other pulled out a pad and began taking names of people in the crowd.

Rick Stemper approached a couple of minutes later. For the
most part, he looked as he had when we were acquaintances at Pennsbury High,
more than twenty-five years before --unruly mop of brown hair, broad shoulders,
athletic build. The only changes were bags below his eyes and a couple of laugh
lines around his mouth.

He was in plain clothes, though his police badge was pinned
to the waistband of his khaki slacks. The tail of his short-sleeved blue and
white check shirt was out, which I knew meant that he had his gun on his belt.

“How does this keep happening, Steve?” he asked, when he
reached us.  He leaned down to scratch Rochester’s neck. “And you? Are you some
kind of murder magnet?” The dog just grinned.

“You don’t know it’s murder,” I said.

“Yeah, guys in sneakers die of natural causes inside old
buildings all the time.” Rick shook his head and walked past us and stepped
over the crime scene tape. I watched as he pulled a Dodger-blue latex glove
from his pocket and slipped it on his right hand. Then he crouched beside the
building and carefully peered in through the gap, our Stewart’s Crossing
Sherlock trying to intuit the past from a collection of random details.