Gone to the Dogs

Description

When a local vet and a pampered pet disappear, Holly Winter and her veterinarian lover Steve Delaney go to the exclusive Cambridge Dog Training Club to investigate."It is Carmichael’s scenic descriptions of the northern Arizona setting, insider’s peek into the world of therapy pets and loveable characters, both human and otherwise, that make this lighthearted romp worth savoring."
—Publishers WeeklySusan Conant, a three-time recipient of the Maxwell Award for Fiction Writing given by the Dog Writers Association of America, lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband. She is the author of nineteen Dog Lover’s Mysteries.1
 
If your name is Holly Winter, Yuletide can be a real bitch. When I say bitch, I know what I’m talking about. I earn my living in the world of dogs. In the pages of Dog’s Life magazine, including the pages occupied by my column, bitch is a neutral word for “female dog,” and when I tell you that I have two Alaskan malamutes, Rowdy and Kimi, a dog and bitch, I’m not swearing. But Holly Winter? In December?
 
I make the best of it. Take Christmas cards. If your name sounds like an ecumenical version of Merry Christmas, you don’t have to wish anyone Season’s Greetings, Happy Holidays, or Health and Happiness Now and in the Coming Year. You just sign in the white space below the picture of your spectacular dogs. In this year’s picture, the best ever, Rowdy and Kimi are wearing snazzy red harnesses, and they’re pulling their sled across a field of snow. The sled is piled with red-blanket stand-ins for bags of toys. The dogs’ plumy white tails are waving over their backs, and their big red tongues are hanging out of their eager, grinning faces. Festive and woofy.
 
In case you wondered, I would like to add that Rowdy and Kimi are certainly not wearing those humiliatingly stupid reindeer-antler headbands you can order from R.C. Steele, New England Serum, J-B, and the other discount pet-supply houses. My picture doesn’t reveal the detail, but the dogs have on Velcro-fastened red velvet bow-tie collars that I copied from the ones in the R.C. Steele catalog. The originals cost about twelve dollars apiece, and I whipped up Rowdy and Kimi’s for practically nothing. The R.C. Steele version, though, is presumably durable. My homemade collars were starting to fray by mid-December, when the dogs had worn their finery only twice, once for the Christmas card photo and once for pictures with Santa. And, no, I did not drag my dogs to some shopping mall to wait in line with the kiddies. The occasion, it so happens, was a benefit for the Animal Rescue League.
 
As I was saying, to preserve the velvet collars for Christmas, I was saving them for special occasions, one of which was Rowdy and Kimi’s visit to the vet for rabies boosters. The fancy dress wasn’t mandatory—you don’t really have to get spiffed up for church or temple, either—but I warn you: Ministers, priests, and rabbis may overlook dirty, ragged coats, tartar-encrusted teeth, untrimmed nails, and unswabbed ears, but veterinarians do not. All creatures bright and beautiful?
 
The late afternoon Boston commuter traffic zooming along in both directions in front of the clinic was so ferocious that I stopped wondering whether my Bronco would get hit before I could make the turn and instead tried to decide whether we’d get front-ended, rear-ended, or sideswiped. I suddenly wished I’d crated the dogs instead of leaving them loose behind the wagon barrier. When a break came, I slammed my foot on the accelerator and roared into the parking lot. Ms. Evel Knievel.
 
I’d just killed the engine, scooped up the ribbon collars, and opened my door when a bright, educated voice rang out my name. A lot of Cambridge women have those classical-music-station voices. Maybe they’re what you get for a big donation to National Public Radio. For a pledge of a hundred dollars or more, you get an NPR voice or a radiotelegraphically correct sweatshirt. My friend and tenant Rita’s friend Deborah must’ve forked up twice: She never left home without the voice, but on that unseasonably warm December day, she also wore one of the sweatshirts. Deborah’s skin is either naturally oily or heavily moisturized. Some stylist must’ve promised her that with a body perm, she could just wash her brown hair and then forget it. Forget it? Whenever Deborah looked in the mirror, she must have noticed that sprouting from her scalp were the crisp liver-colored ringlets of an Irish water spaniel. I mean, how could she forget a thing like that? The woman with Deborah had very short, dark, distinctly human hair and wore a red jersey outfit I’d admired when I’d seen it in the window of Pirjo, a tiny place on Huron Avenue where I can’t afford to shop. Envy? Of course.
 
If you live somewhere normal, you probably think that after hailing me, Deborah introduced me to her friend, and you’re right, except that in Cambridge, names are incidental. An introduction here consists of telling each person what the other one does for a living. Psychotherapists, though, usually don’t even do that; unless stated otherwise, it goes without saying that everyone else is a therapist, too.
 
“Karla’s at the Mount Auburn,” Deborah said. I understood what she meant because Rita, who’s a psychologist, speaks the same patois: Karla, Deborah was informing me, worked as a psychotherapist at the Mount Auburn Hospital. Then Deborah explained me to Karla. “Holly is Rita’s landlady,” she began, then added, “Holly’s a, uh, dog writer.” She sneezed, pulled a tissue from her pocket, and wiped her nose. “Is that what you say?”
 
“Dog writer,” I said. Self-explanatory, isn’t it? Still, I felt compelled to expand. “I write about dogs.”
 
“People usually say, “Oh, isn’t that interesting,” as if it weren’t—it is—or they ask me whether there’s some quick, easy way to get their dogs to come when they’re called—there isn’t.
 
“Really?” Karla said. She paused. An unspoken word formed on her lips. Outré? or maybe quaint. “Rita talks about you,” she added ominously, extending a tentative hand for me to shake.
 
If she expected me to give my paw, the mistake was natural. Brush two malamutes, and you end up disguised as a third. Except for the knees, my jeans were okay, but bits of pale, fluffy malamute undercoat clung to my old black lightweight hooded sweatshirt, the one with the kangaroo pocket. Worse, my hairy, oversize, once-black socks were the pair my teenage cousin Leah had made me buy. Slouch socks? Is that what they’re called? Out of some misguided sense of family loyalty, I’d smooshed them around my ankles the way Leah always did. She’d persuaded me that the socks were definitely not too young for someone just over thirty. They were.
 
Anyway, the embarrassing thing wasn’t the shirt or the socks or even the fur. When I pulled my right hand out of the pocket of the sweatshirt, out tumbled a mess of semipowdered freeze-dried liver and some desiccated, long-forgotten bits of cheese. I train with food.
 
“Dog treats,” I said feebly, wiping my palm on my jeans. I nodded toward the Bronco.
 
Karla withdrew her hand and said, “Huskies.” Malamutes aren’t, of course.
 
“Beautiful,” Deborah said.
 
Like most other malamute people, I have a spiel that I usually deliver when someone mistakes the dogs for Siberians—malamutes are bigger than Siberian huskies, never have blue eyes, and all the rest—but today I just said thanks. Deborah and Karla took off on long, confident strides. They probably discussed some fashionable topic in female psychology. Bonding rituals. Women and self-esteem.
 
I inched open the tailgate of the Bronco. I had the collars looped around my left wrist, and I groped with my right hand until I had a solid grip on the dogs’ leashes. Rowdy and Kimi wagged their tails, licked my face, and squirmed to get out of the car. Because Rowdy was a little closer to me than Kimi was, I grabbed his regular rolled-leather collar first and held it tightly while I wrapped the velvet ribbon around his neck and tried to line up the Velcro strips to fasten it neatly. The first time, I got it on too loose, and just as I was ripping the little plastic teeth apart, Kimi spotted something compelling across the street, a dog running loose, a child eating an ice cream cone, or maybe nothing more than freedom itself. I should, of course, have fastened her leash to some solid object in the car or, failing that, locked it in my fist, but as it was, the loop at my end of the leash hung around my wrist. When Kimi barged past Rowdy and shot out of the car, she and her leash flew beyond my reach.
 
I shoved Rowdy backward into the Bronco, slammed the tailgate, then stepped toward the traffic, as camouflaged in my black jersey and navy jeans as Kimi was in her dark wolf gray. Both of us blended invisibly into the twilight. Some of the cars speeding by had their headlights on. Kimi’s full mask—her black cap and goggles and the black bar down her muzzle—absorbed the light and left her nearly invisible as she pranced back and forth along the white line separating the two lanes of dog-crushing metal speeding southward from the two lanes heading north. The cars and vans shot by her like a barrage of bullets from a pair of double barrels aimed at each other. My beautiful dog capered in the cross fire.
 
Seconds later, no longer playful, she began to watch for a break. Taller and wiser, I saw none, but stood helpless, almost in the street, my heart thudding painfully, the whoosh and roar of the traffic sucking at my clothes. I desperately needed to guide Kimi, but what could I shout to her? Stay! And wait to be hit? Kimi, come! And be killed instantly? Waving my arms, I screamed to the passing drivers: “Stop!” Then desperately, over and over, “Help me! Stop! Please stop!” A dark van veered toward me. The driver leaned on his horn.
 
In the two lanes close to me, the traffic was even heavier than on the far side, but slower. A Mercedes doing a good forty or fifty in this thirty-mile zone missed Kimi by inches, and in the lights of a demon-driven Saab, I saw on her pretty, gutsy face an expression I’d almost never seen there before: the flash of raw fear. No longer prancing, she paced slowly, ready to bolt. I knew what would follow: panic, a dash, the squeal of brakes, and the horror of metal on flesh, Kimi in agony, maimed, dead, and all of it my fault, the inevitable result of my vain need to doll up creatures born perfect.US

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