Creature Discomforts Read online

  Praise for Susan Conant’s

  Dog Lover’s Mysteries

  EVIL BREEDING

  “Conant may have invented a new genre: the canine historical mystery.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “A tail-thumping good read.” —Rocky Mountain News

  “[A] tale that fans of Gothic, amateur detectives, and pet lovers will cherish.” —Book Browser

  THE BARKER STREET REGULARS

  “Sherlockians especially will enjoy Conant’s latest dog mystery featuring journalist Holly Winter in her most intricate case yet.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Dog lore and Sherlockiana will keep Conant’s audience interested…. Recommended.” —Deadly Pleasures

  STUD RITES

  “An intimate knowledge of Alaskan malamutes isn’t necessary to appreciate Susan Conant’s Stud Rites…. Conant’s characterizations are dead-on and her descriptions of doggy kitsch—most notably a malamute-shaped lamp trimmed with a dead champion’s fur—are hilarious.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Conant’s doggy tales… are head and shoulders above many of the other series in which various domestic pets aid or abet in the solving of crimes Should appeal to everyone who is on the right end of a leash.”

  —The Purloined Letter

  BLACK RIBBON

  “A fascinating murder mystery and a very, very funny book… written with a fairness that even Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie would admire.” —Mobile Register

  RUFFLY SPEAKING

  “Conant’s dog lover’s series, starring Cambridge freelance dog-magazine reporter Holly Winter and her two malamutes, Rowdy and Kimi, is a real tail-wagger.” —The Washington Post

  BLOODLINES

  “Highly recommended for lovers of dogs, people, and all-around good storytelling.” —Mystery News

  “Lively, funny, and absolutely premium, Conant’s readers—with ears up and alert eyes—eagerly await her next.” —Kirkus Reviews

  GONE TO THE DOGS

  “Conant infuses her writing with a healthy dose of humor about Holly’s fido-loving friends and other Cambridge clichés. The target of her considerable wit clearly emerges as human nature.” —Publishers Weekly

  ANIMAL APPETITE

  “Swift and engrossing.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Invigorating… Conant gives us a cool, merry, and informative look at academic Cambridge.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  ALSO BY SUSAN CONANT

  Evil Breeding

  The Barker Street Regulars Animal Appetite

  Stud Rites

  Black Ribbon

  Ruffly Speaking

  Bloodlines

  Gone to the Dogs

  Paws Before Dying

  A Bite of Death

  Dead and Doggone

  A New Leash on Death

  To Carter, Rowdy, and Kobi,

  my hiking partners

  on the trails of Acadia

  Acknowledgments

  I hope that readers who share my love for the novels of Margery Allingham will take pleasure in recognizing in this story a small tribute to my favorite mystery writer. Dog lovers will certainly find countless unbridled tributes to my own dogs, Frostfield Firestar’s Kobuk, C.G.C., and Frostfield Perfect Crime, C.D., C.G.C., Th.D., and to all dogs everywhere.

  For help with some of the background of this story, I am grateful to Jill Hunter; and to the members of Malamute-L, a discussion group for fanciers of the Alaskan malamute, and PSG, the Poodle Support Group. Thanks, too, to Deborah Dwyer, Roseann Mandell, and Geoff Stern; to Jean Berman, Dorothy Donohue, Roo Grubis, Margherita Walker, Anya Wittenborg, and Corinne Zipps; to my wonderful agent, Deborah Schneider; and to my editor, the incomparable Kate Miciak.

  Steve Rubin, please note that the bichon frise in this story is named Molly. You see? I did put your dog in a book.

  Chapter One

  I CAME TO MY SENSES between a rock and a hard place. The rock was a boulder hurled millennia ago in thankless rage by a reluctantly northbound glacier. Still, it was a rock of ages: cleft for me. My bruised body fit so neatly into its riven side, a deep, narrow fissure, that the rock might almost have been cleft to measure. Too sick to move, I remained hidden in the rock. Only my head protruded. I rested face up in what proved to be a puddle of rainwater and blood in a shallow depression in the hard place, a ridge prettily embellished with lacy lichen in a deceptively soft shade of pastel green. Around the boulder and into its cleft grew stunted blueberry bushes that bore, here and there, clusters of tiny wild berries and dried-up bits of what had once been fruit, single berries mummified, perhaps even petrified.

  In retrospect, it feels peculiar to owe my life to a boulder and its surrounding cushion of lowbush blueberries, but the giant rock is undoubtedly what broke my fall, and without the masses of wild shrubbery to absorb the impact, the body-on-boulder slam would almost certainly have killed me. As it was, I lay unconscious for what I now estimate to be an hour. During that lost time, I half-roused for seconds or even minutes. In moments of forgotten semiconsciousness, I must have slipped my body feet-first into that opening in the rock, acting as my own kindly undertaker. In dog training, we happily recognize anticipation as a sign of learning. A dog who comes before he is called has figured out what to expect next. In my case, however, the Great Handler did not call me to my final reward.

  I’m tempted to romanticize my return to consciousness. It’s difficult to control the corny urge to drop allegorical hints about spiritual renaissance: Naked came I, slithering out of a dark passageway into water and blood, double-cured of sin, enlightened, born again. My actual revivification was disgustingly different from the kind of rebirth that would’ve put me permanently in the ribbons in the My-Soul’s-Better-Than-Yours class. The first thing I did was to roll painfully over, gag, and then pollute the water and blood in the would-be-symbolic baptismal font with what looked, even from my perspective, like copious ropes of saliva cascading from the jowly mouth of some drooly giant-breed dog. In my own ears, I sounded like an allergic dog in the throes of what’s known as “reverse sneezing.” The phrase even crossed my mind. Oddly enough, it was comforting to diagnose myself with a canine malady.

  The nausea and choking began to subside. What took their place was a global sensation compounded of pain, cold, and terror. A sensible person would have assumed that the acute fear was an adaptive response to my real plight. The pain began to differentiate. The burning of torn skin was worse on my knees and my right hand than it was elsewhere. My scratched face stung. Stabs and throbbing radiated from my right elbow down to my fingers and up to my shoulder. An object dug mercilessly into my abdomen. A foreign object? One of my own ribs? My head hurt less than the bad elbow but, without my consent, had moved someplace it didn’t belong—to the middle of my stomach and ten feet away, both at the same time. But pain wasn’t going to kill me. Died of exposure, I thought. Exposure meant hypothermia, a life-threatening drop in the body’s core temperature.

  Instead of rolling over, sitting up—offering a paw, perhaps?—and seeking heat, I took satisfaction in the word itself: hypothermia. How delightfully polysyllabic! Counting the syllables seemed like a grand idea. Hypo- made two. By the time I reached the end, I’d not only lost the subtotal, but forgotten the word I was playing with. Polysyllabic? For a giddy second, the sound of the final syllable struck me as a brilliant comment on my situation: Ick! The childish assessment triggered a moment of clarity. Shifting my head ever so slightly away from the puddle, I propped my chin on the lichen and made an effort to take stock of myself. My face, I realized, must be the same whitish green as the miniature forest around me.

  That reflection, if you’ll pardon the forthcoming pun, brought with it the hideous realization that if
I were to look in a mirror, I would have no idea what image to expect in the glass. In panic, I tried to move my right hand. Pain roared up my arm. I did, however, manage to roll onto my back and, with my left hand, clumsily unzip the top six or eight inches of my anorak. My left hand answered a fundamental question. Breasts. The fear ebbed as I savored the joy of dawning self-knowledge. Sex: female. Skin color: green. Handedness: right. Vocabulary: polysyllabic. Body temperature: hypothermic.

  Having discovered the rudiments of who, or at least what I was, I made the mental leap to wondering where I was. Instead of remembering where I’d been that morning or how I’d hurt myself, I had an hallucinatory recollection of a Gauguin painting that hung, I was certain, in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The picture showed Tahitians across the life span. It was titled D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? The name of the language lingered on the tip of my tongue, but I translated easily: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Gauguin’s images inspired me to decide, mostly on the basis of incipient hypothermia, that I was not in Tahiti. As it turned out, I was correct. Good girl! Sharp. Excellent. A triple-digit IQ lay only a few mental steps ahead.

  Finding it a bit difficult to survey my surroundings while sprawled flat, I struggled to get to my feet. Dizziness stopped me. The nausea returned. And retreated. The whirling abated. Shuddering with cold, I was now sitting on the lichen-covered ledge with my legs stretched in front of me. The fog was so thick that my new vantage point provided little information. I wore jeans with recent-looking rips in the knees. The skin visible through the holes was raw. The heavy hiking boots I wore were undamaged. What came as a surprise was my backpack, which I hadn’t known was there. It was a lightweight pack suitable for day hiking, bright red, with an unpadded hip belt that had slipped upward and twisted to cut deeply and painfully into my abdomen. The second I released the clasp, the pain lessened. Once the ground around me stopped spinning, I realized that I was on the side of a steep hill or mountain. The ledge, my hard place, sloped upward. I had obviously fallen, and then bounced and rolled downhill and across the ledge until I collided with the boulder. Uphill, bordering the ledge, grew dark green moss interspersed with a few infant evergreens, huckleberry bushes, and what I thought might be azaleas. Below were a few oak saplings and a beautifully gnarled pine that looked like a giant version of the artfully pruned trees in those Japanese dish gardens. What were they called? Everything else, on all sides, hid in the fog. I’d been dimly aware of sounds that were now easy to identify as distant foghorns and, far below me, tires speeding along pavement. The ocean. A blacktop road.

  Instead of feeling relief at my proximity to civilization, I again fell victim to dread. Something was urgent and frightening. I remembered everything about this dangerous, terrible something—every nuance of fear, every trace of desperate worry that the responsibility to act was mine alone. Entirely missing was all memory of what this terrible something was.

  The memory startled me as violently as if it had been a snake suddenly slithering through the fog bank. I held perfectly still in an effort to keep my equilibrium as I teetered between the shaky here-and-now and the unbalanced moments of half-arousal when I’d overheard the scraps of conversation. The sounds had come from somewhere to my right. Somewhere above? How far away? I couldn’t guess. Like a picky eater, the fog swallowed some words and phrases and spat out others.

  “Tragic.” The voice was a man’s. “Tragic accident. No one could’ve survived.” The fog ate whatever came next. “Keep your name out of it. You have my absolute assurance.”

  His soft-spoken companion’s reply was lost to me, but I heard the first speaker’s attentive murmurs of agreement. “Yes… Uh-huh…. Yes.” In apparent response to a suggestion, the man exclaimed, “Out of the question! The media would seize on it.” The fog exercised its appetite. A word reached me: “Death.” Then, with a note of finality, the man said, “Anonymity is, after all, anonymity.”

  As the memory faded, the voice rang itself to silence in my ears.

  Tragic accident. Whose? Whose death?

  The ledge was reassuringly devoid of harps. The recollected conversation didn’t meet my expectations of an angel choir. The fog had an earthy odor, like old compost, with a tinge of balsam and wild thyme, maybe, or some other herb. Still, perched as I was high in a cloud in some nameless region, I had to consider the possibility that the death under consideration was my own.

  Chapter Two

  SPEAKING OF HAVING DIED and gone to heaven…

  Musical metallic jingles and the crash of bodies through underbrush heralded the twofold apparition that zoomed out of the mist. Was I seeing double? Thickly furred in a lupine shade of dark gray, the beasts radiated the wild and primitive aura of protocreatures cast forward in time from some shining netherworld ruled by a Creator who’d mated wolves to teddy bears. Speeding down the ledge, however, the animals moved like great cats. Before I could either rise or curl in fetal protection against their onslaught, they fell on me, knocked me flat to the rock, and began to scour my raw face with huge pink tongues.

  “Off!” I demanded. “Off! Off!”

  In what struck me more as accidental cooperation than as anything remotely like obedience, the dogs leaped to their big-boned snowshoe paws and wagged plumelike white tails before hurling themselves onto their backs, wiggling all over, and foolishly waving all eight powerful white legs in the air. Responding to the friendly invitation, I rubbed the two furry white tummies and scratched the two muscular chests while simultaneously seizing the chance to size up what were clearly going to be my saviors. The heat of the dogs’ underbellies was already warming my hands. I was not going to die. With no irreverence, I said softly, “Thank God.”

  As if performing a well-rehearsed act, both dogs quit squirming. They folded their legs, tucked in their massive forepaws, and fixed deep-brown, almond-shaped eyes on me. On close inspection, the dogs were far from identical. The larger dog, revealed as an intact male, must, I thought, outweigh his female companion by at least ten pounds. He stood about twenty-five inches at the withers. She was perhaps twenty-three. His muzzle was slightly blockier than hers, his triangular ears a hint smaller. His eyes were a deep bittersweet chocolate, a little darker than hers, and he had a notably soft expression, mainly, I thought, because his face was white, whereas hers was heavily masked. Dark markings made goggles around her eyes and blended into a bar that ran down her muzzle and up to a sort of widow’s peak cap on her broad skull. Reveling in the tummy rub, she nonetheless studied me with the intensity of a fundamentally serious intelligence. The male, in contrast, sank into bliss with a carefree smile on his face.

  But I have neglected to mention the newcomers’ most striking characteristics. First, the dogs were utterly and overwhelmingly beautiful. Second, both were dressed in red. She wore a sturdy-looking pack with heavy, bulging saddlebags that had shifted forward and twisted to one side. He was in a state of considerable dishabille: Three black straps with quick-release buckles fastened a red saddle-shaped pad snugly to his back; one strap ran across his big chest, the others around his middle. Down the length of the pad and on each shoulder were strips of black Velcro that must have secured saddlebags like the female’s. He, however, had dumped or lost his pack somewhere. The jaunty red vest gave him the debonair look of a canine dandy.

  Mindful of the hum of distant traffic, I said in fierce, quiet tones, “If you were my dogs, you’d never be allowed to run loose!”

  I had to admit to myself, however, that the dogs showed obvious signs of responsible ownership. Although they’d been tearing around on their own, they were dragging red leashes that matched the packs. The leads were snapped to rolled-leather collars with brass fittings, from which dangled the tags I’d heard jangling. Fastened to the male’s collar was a bright circle of yellow with block capital letters announcing I AM A THERAPY DOG. Although I couldn’t imagine what the declaration meant, the message felt aimed directly at me. Therapy wa
s exactly what I needed. The dogs, in a furry sort of way, clearly intended to provide it. In addition to the therapy-dog tag, the male wore a Saint Francis of Assisi medal. Both dogs were licensed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had been immunized against rabies at a veterinary clinic there. They had tags from the National Dog Registry. Identical owner ID tags proclaimed the dogs the property of one Holly Winter of 256 Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138. Her phone number was listed. The dogs’ names were not. Whoever she was, she took good care of her animals. The dogs’ clean, gorgeous stand-off coats testified to an excellent diet and careful grooming. When the dogs had wiggled their feet in the air, I’d noticed that the nails were short and that the hair between the black pads had been trimmed to neaten the appearance of the feet. Even so, I felt a flash of outrage. This Winter person with the silly, Christmassy name should damned well have held tightly to those leashes! No matter what, you never let go of a leash! Never! My anger brought insight. Not for a second had I felt any fear of these big, powerful dogs. On the contrary, from the moment they’d barged out of the cloud that surrounded us, I’d felt increasingly strong and self-confident. Good! In what I now see as one of the monumental understatements of the millennium, I congratulated myself on being a person who liked dogs.

  By now, I was on my feet. To my amazement, the female had stationed herself in a solid stand at my left side and hadn’t budged as I’d rested my weight on her and hauled myself up. I’d had to keep lowering my head to let the blood reach whatever disconnected bits of my brain had survived my crash. Each time my head descended, the handsome male planted wet kisses on my face.