Sire and Damn (Dog Lover's Mysteries Book 20) Read online

  SIRE AND DAMN.

  Copyright © 2015 by Susan Conant.

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this novel are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover Designer: Terry Albert

  Editor: Jim Thomsen

  Interior Designer: Jovana Shirley, Unforeseen Editing, www.unforeseenediting.com

  In loving memory of my darling Mandy (1997-2013)

  contents

  acknowledgments

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  chapter twenty-three

  chapter twenty-four

  chapter twenty-five

  chapter twenty-six

  chapter twenty-seven

  chapter twenty-eight

  chapter twenty-nine

  chapter thirty

  chapter thirty-one

  chapter thirty-two

  chapter thirty-three

  chapter thirty-four

  chapter thirty-five

  chapter thirty-six

  chapter thirty-seven

  chapter thirty-eight

  chapter thirty-nine

  chapter forty

  chapter forty-one

  chapter forty-two

  chapter forty-three

  “Oh what a tangled web we weave,

  When first we practice to deceive!”

  Sir Walter Scott

  acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Elaine Jordan for answering my many questions about psychiatric service dogs and, in particular, about her beautiful Belgian sheepdog, Cibola’s Destry Rides Again, CGC, TT, SD (2004-2013), who was an admirable ambassador for service dogs and, indeed, for all dogs. Thanks, too, to Russ Livingston, MD, for talking with me about prescription-drug samples. For help with the manuscript, I am grateful to Jean Berman, Tanja Gube, Roseann Mandell, Lillian Sober-Ain, Geoff Stern, Anya Wittenborg, Carter Umbarger, and Corinne Zipps. Special thanks to my friend and editor, Jim Thomsen, and to my delightful proofreader, Christina Tinling.

  chapter one

  “Stop comparing me to a dog!” Rita demanded.

  The comparison was inevitable. On that hot Monday morning in August, my dear friend Rita looked and sounded as sick as one. I’d have made the comparison, anyway. Drawing parallels between people and dogs is an occupational hazard: I’m a dog trainer. Holly Winter? Maybe we’ve met at shows or trials. I’m the one with the malamutes. Or maybe you’ve seen my column in Dog’s Life? Or read my blog or one of my books? You see, I’m also a dog writer.

  The term dog writer should be self-explanatory, shouldn’t it? Since you can tell to look at me that I’m not a dog who writes, I must therefore be a woman who writes about dogs, which is to say, a dog writer. But around here? In Cambridge, Massachusetts? Yes, Cambridge, where your neighbors can explain a Green’s function approach to quantum many-body systems in fluent Pali or discuss the hagiographical tradition in relation to the growth of density fluctuations, but you get blank looks when you say that you’re a dog writer. These are people who sprinkle metaethics on their granola. They make jokes about igneous petrology and Chaucer’s self-canonization. Ulysses is their idea of a beach read.

  And when I say that I’m a dog writer, I have to add, “I write about dogs,” or they don’t know what I’m talking about. And then when I’ve explicated, what do I hear? I’ll tell you what: a snooty little laugh followed by a response reflective of almost unfathomable ignorance, namely, “Dogs? What is there to write about dogs?”

  Everything, that’s what. Why? Because if it exists, it exists in dogs. Take morning sickness.

  “Morning sickness is actually quite uncommon in dogs,” I told Rita. “That golden retriever bitch I told you about was an exception, and she didn’t get really sick. She’d just eat her breakfast and then get a funny smile and—”

  “I do not want to hear the details!” Rita croaked. “I always thought that morning sickness was psychological.”

  “You always think that everything is psychological.” Another occupational hazard: Rita is a clinical psychologist. “But you really are under a lot of stress. Transitions are stressful. Good transitions and bad transitions. Or that’s what I read in a magazine in the dentist’s waiting room. Anyway, you’re pregnant, you and Quinn have just bought this house, and you’re about to get married.”

  Rita was only two months pregnant, so except for the greenish tinge to her complexion, she looked the same as ever: attractive and stylish in a distinctively New York way, as if she were about to be photographed by Bill Cunningham for The New York Times. What could be more New York than being dressed for Cunningham’s “On the Street” when you’re in your own backyard? She wore a white outfit of linen pants and a sleeveless top. On her pedicured feet were espadrille sandals with platform soles, wedge heels, and thin leather straps. The polish on her fingernails and toenails matched her pale-rose lipstick. Her hair formed its usual neat little brown cap, but I wondered whether the chemically blonded streaks were doomed. She was obsessed with protecting her unborn baby—my godchild-to-be—from toxins.

  “Human pregnancy is so damned long,” I added sympathetically. “Nine months! Dogs are incredibly efficient. It takes them only sixty-three days to accomplish—”

  “Please! Enough!”

  “I wasn’t comparing you to a dog,” I said. “I was just pointing out that if you were a dog, you’d be whelping a whole litter right about now instead of wasting seven more months to produce one human baby.”

  “Dear God,” Rita said to herself. “And don’t say ‘Dog spelled backward’!” She shook her head and added inexplicably, “I’ll never get used to it.”

  If Rita meant my interest in dogs, she’d had plenty of time to get used to it. Until a few weeks earlier, she’d lived in the apartment on the top floor of my house, which is the three-story barn-red one at the corner of Appleton and Concord. My house. Pardon me. My husband hates that my. Our house, as it truly is, Steve’s and mine. Before we got married, our house was my house, and Steve lived above his vet clinic. Steve Delaney, DVM: first my vet, then my lover, then my husband, and now all three at once. I’d always dreaded . . . Pardon me. We, Steve and I, had hated the thought that Rita would ever move, but it hadn’t occurred to us that she’d move a half block down the street from us and that we wouldn’t lose her after all.

  Our end of Appleton Street, the Concord Avenue end, started life as a working-class neighborhood, but Harvard’s thirty-one-odd-billion-dollar endowment has trickled down on us, pooled beneath our property values, and buoyed them up on waves of gentrification. Rita and Quinn’s new house rode at the top of a crest, while Steve’s and mine floated in a trough, albeit a spacious and attractive trough. When I bought the house, I lived in the ground-floor apartment and rented out the other two. Then when Steve and I got married, we extended our living space to include the second floor, mainly because merging our canine households meant that we needed room for three Alaskan malamutes, a German shepherd, and a point
er.

  The improvements I’ve made and we’ve made over the years have been piecemeal: our kitchen now has a tile floor instead of the original linoleum, and the second-floor kitchen has become a bedroom. By far the best kitchen and bathroom are in the third-floor apartment, in Rita’s old apartment, which got redone when she moved from the second floor to the third. Rita and Quinn’s house, in contrast, had been totally renovated about ten years earlier, and only five years ago, the kitchen had been all redone in cherry and glass and granite and stainless steel.

  But the enviable feature of Rita and Quinn’s new house was the fenced yard, where we were sitting on that hot Monday morning in August. In Cambridge, Steve and I are lucky to have a yard at all, and our fence is perfectly adequate, but we don’t have the space that Rita now does to train our dogs for advanced obedience and agility and rally. In our yard, I could set up one jump, or two crammed close together, or a tunnel or some other piece of agility equipment, but Rita’s new yard was at least three times the size of ours, long enough to let the dogs run full tilt and big enough to set up a smallish rally-obedience or agility course.

  Also, its potential as a dog-training area wasn’t ruined by flower beds, sundials, decorative pools, or other obstructions. Since the vegetation consisted of a rather rough lawn and a variety of shrubs in mulched borders along the fence, there was almost nothing for dogs to ruin. Not that the yard was barren. Far from it. Next to the glass doors to the kitchen, over the bluestone patio where we were sitting, rose an iron structure covered with grapevines, and Rita and Quinn had already furnished the shady area with a wrought-iron dining table and chairs, two teak recliners with flower-patterned cushions, and a variety of small wrought-iron chairs, side tables, and coffee tables. Begonias and impatiens bloomed in pots and planters, and the pale-yellow of the house added warm color.

  A temporary feature of the patio was one of my malamutes, Rowdy—my first malamute, first among equals, eighty-five pounds of beauty, brawn, and brains in a dark-gray-and-white standoff coat. He was as sweet as he was strong, and thus, in my opinion and that of many esteemed American Kennel Club judges, the Alaskan malamute standard incarnate, archetype of gorgeous Arctic dog, and quintessence of canine perfection. Do I exaggerate? Certainly not. And at the moment, the handsome boy wasn’t even at his best: In spite of being asleep, as he was now, he had a hint of resentment on his face. So profound was Rowdy’s loathing of hot weather that even in deepest slumber, he detested the heat.

  “You’re discombobulated,” I said to Rita. “A lot is happening all at once. Maybe too much.”

  We were seated across from each other at the dining table. Because the smell of coffee exacerbated Rita’s nausea, I was drinking tea, and she was taking small sips of the raspberry tea I’d given her as a present. As every old-time breeder knows, raspberry leaves are a traditional panacea for pregnancy-related complaints, but I hadn’t said so to Rita. As I’ve already suggested, Rita clung to the irrational, unscientific view that human and canine pregnancies were utterly dissimilar, and that my wealth of knowledge about the care and feeding of pregnant bitches was inapplicable to her present circumstance.

  She took another sip of the raspberry tea and said, “Well, I’m beginning to feel a little better now.”

  I was, of course, tempted to say, “So there! Cured by a dog remedy,” but if I had, she’d have stopped drinking the tea.

  “Could I just whine a little?” she asked with a smile. “Can you stand a litany of complaints? It sometimes helps to verbalize.”

  “What are friends for?” I said, without adding anything about the raspberry remedy.

  “Okay.” She held out her left hand and tapped her left thumb with her right index finger. “I can’t stop throwing up.” Tapping her left index finger, she added, “Hostility personified, my aunt Vicky, is getting here today.” Left middle finger: “Quinn just had to pick this time to move his office, on top of everything else, and instead of shifting all his office junk to his new office, he’s moved everything here, supposedly to sort it out, which is what he hasn’t done.” Smacking her left ring finger, she said, “All of the relatives who are about to arrive are fighting with one another or are going to.” Left little finger: “Instead of ordering from the bridal registries, Quinn’s relatives in Montana are sending zebra-patterned towels and leopard-patterned sheets.”

  I interrupted. “Steve and I can always use extra dog towels, and the sheets will do for crate pads. Give them to me.”

  “Consider it done. Once Quinn’s parents go home.” Raising her right hand and bending the thumb, she said, “Sixth, on that subject, Quinn still hasn’t told his parents about the baby.”

  “They’ll guess. They’re bound to notice that you’re throwing up all the time.”

  “I don’t do it in their presence. By the way, bless your father and Gabrielle for inviting them to Maine. I can tolerate only so many houseguests at a time.”

  Gabrielle: my dear stepmother, whom my father married because he fell in love with her and not because she owned a big house right on the ocean on Mount Desert Island—which is to say, practically in Acadia National Park.

  “Rita, we have plenty of room, including your apartment. You’re welcome to shift everyone up the street to our house.”

  “Thanks, but Uncle Oscar is no trouble—he sleeps a lot, and he’s a sweetheart—and you’re going to have my cousin John and my parents, and as of tonight, you’ll have Zara and Izzy. John is going to bore you talking about his horrible ex-wife—she really was ghastly—but since he’s a pathological liar in a minor way, it’s hard to know what to believe, but he’s basically a nice guy. And my parents are”—she shrugged and eyed the heavens—”my parents.”

  Rita’s cousin John was due to arrive in Cambridge the next day, Tuesday; and Rita’s parents were getting here two days after that, on Thursday. My father, my stepmother, and my cousin Leah would arrive on Friday, the day before the wedding. The last to get here would be Rita’s Uncle Dave, who was Zara’s father and Vicky’s husband; he was flying in on Saturday morning, just barely in time for the wedding. As for Rita’s brother and his family, they weren’t even bothering to return home from Italy in time for the wedding.

  “I’d love to get rid of Aunt Vicky,” Rita continued, “but I won’t inflict her on you, and besides, you’re taking Zara, and we can’t ask Zara to stay in the same place as her mother. Vicky is at her worst with Zara, and she’s just impossible about Izzy.”

  Vicky was Rita’s maternal aunt. Zara, Vicky’s daughter, was . . . well, let’s skip the family tree for now. What I want to say is that Zara was my favorite member of Rita’s family, unless you count Izzy, a charming black Labrador retriever who was Zara’s psychiatric service dog. I, of course, certainly do count Izzy. In describing Izzy as a psychiatric service dog, I am, by the way, saying exactly what Zara herself said, and, according to Zara, precisely what Vicky hated hearing her daughter say.

  Rita contemplated her right hand. “Where were we?”

  “Seven, I think, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “Seven or whatever it is, there’s Willie.”

  Rita’s Scottish terrier, Willie, had been hospitalized for a puzzling case of acute gastritis and consequent dehydration. He’d seemed like a dog with a foreign object lodged in his intestines—a toy, a corncob, a chunk of plastic, a bone, a rock—but thorough diagnostic investigations had revealed no such object and, in fact, no actual obstruction. Having cost Rita a tremendous amount of money by spending time at the Angell Animal Medical Center, he’d made an excellent, if mysterious, recovery.

  “He’s coming home today,” I said.

  Rita contemplated her right hand. “Are my fingers puffy? Eight. Nine? Zara has put my wedding all over Facebook, and my patients are going to see everything about my private life.”

  “There are privacy settings, as you’d know if you’d get on Facebook.”

  “I am on Facebook. Zara put me there.”

  “If
you’d use it, Rita, you’d like it, and all Zara has done is post on her own Facebook page.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with social media. Look what’s happened! It’s only because of Zara and that Facebook page or whatever it is that John is here. This is supposed to be a small wedding for family and friends, and he is not someone I’m close to, but when he invited himself, I couldn’t say no, could I?”

  Before I could reply, Rowdy rose to his feet and uttered a peal of woo-woo-woos. The gate to the yard burst open, and in flew Zara, who announced, “Rita! Holly! Something terrible happened! Someone tried to steal Izzy!“

  chapter two

  A few minutes before the arrival of Zara and Izzy, Rowdy presses his belly to the cool bluestone. Through almost-black almond-shaped eyes, he regards the glass doors to the frigidly air-conditioned kitchen. In contrast to Rita, he has only one complaint, and it’s so simple that it can be stated in a single word: heat. He does not say or think the word heat, of course, but feels a hideous, pervasive sensation of sultry, feverish toxicity. Heat? He loathes it with all his Arctic heart. Even here on the bluestone in the shade of the grapevine, the temperature is at least twenty degrees too hot for Alaskan malamute comfort and fifty degrees short of frozen bliss. As for the melting ice cubes in the nearby metal bowl, are they some kind of joke? Ice cubes are nothing, nothing, nothing! Rowdy doesn’t want piddling little ice cubes, damn it! What Rowdy wants is an entire glacier.

  Alternatively, he’d like something to eat. Delicious scents of bacon, eggs, and toast leak through the narrow spaces between the glass doors and their frames. Traces of yogurt, granola, and milk linger in the air. High up in the house, the ancient man plods across a floor. No one but Rowdy hears the footfalls. Rowdy not only hears them but also attends to them, as he attends to everything the ancient man does. As Rowdy knows, the ancient man has a secret habit of slipping food to dogs. Therefore, he is a revered personage.