A Bite of Death Read online

  A BITE OF DEATH

  With a New Preface

  SUSAN CONANT

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2011 by Susan Conant

  First edition published 1991

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please buy only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

  2011 PREFACE

  One night more than twenty years ago, I fell into a light sleep only to be jolted awake by a thought that seized my imagination: What if I died and came back to life as my own dog? The result of my little hypnogogic experience was A Bite of Death, my third dog lover's mystery, which I wrote while I was simultaneously correcting the proofs of its immediate predecessor and plotting its successor. As I began work on this 2011 edition of A Bite of Death, I half expected to find that characters from the previous book and the next one had taken advantage of my mental juggling to drop into this one. I was surprised and relieved to discover that my characters had stayed where they belonged and that there were no accidental interlopers to be excised.

  I was, however, sorely tempted to delete the words dominance and alpha from Holly's narrative, which is to say that I longed to ruin the historical accuracy of the book by introducing glaring anachronisms: I wanted to leap back in time to inform Holly that dogs are far less like wolves than she supposes, and I ached to present her with a twenty-first century understanding of canine social cognition and a crash course on the click-and-treat dog-training techniques that didn't exist in 1990. Holly was, however, a creature of her time––a time that I faithfully, if unintentionally, documented in A Bite of Death. Although Karen Pryor had published Don't Shoot the Dog in 1985, the positive-reinforcement revolution in dog training had yet to begin. In A Bite of Death, originally published in April of 1991, Holly is prerevolutionary, but by the standards of the time, she is notably humane. To an overwhelming extent, dog training in those days relied on the technique advocated in William Koehler's books and popularized by Barbara Woodhouse: catch the dog doing something wrong and correct the error by jerking hard on a choke collar. A favorite way to teach a dog not to jump on people was to squirt him in the face with lemon juice or, worse, ammonia. The squirt bottle that Holly advocates for use in correcting unwanted behavior is filled with nothing worse than water, and nowhere does she recommend the then-common practice of curing a dog of leaping on people by stomping on his hind feet. In principle, she understands that the best way to eradicate an undesired behavior is to teach a desired alternative, but she doesn't yet know how to translate that theory into practice. To her credit, Holly is working on attention, and even though she doesn't know how to train with food, she's doing it anyway. Let me assure readers new to the series that she will learn!

  Remarkably timeless, however, are Holly's observations of dogs. When she manages to free herself from the wolf-oriented sway of the Monks of New Skete, she is a keen observer of domestic dogs. To say that she appreciates the sensory and communicative abilities of dogs is a gross understatement. She is amazed! She is stunned! She is as thoroughly awestruck as I am myself. In fact, it's because of the all-but-preternatural abilities of real dogs—our dogs, all of them!—that I've never endowed my fictional dogs with paranormal powers of any kind. Although I've been watching dogs for my entire life, I still struggle to grasp the seemingly impossible sharpness of the canine ear and, as figures prominently in A Bite of Death, the astounding keenness of the canine nose. With this miraculous reality, who needs fantasy? Furthermore, dogs don't keep their perceptions to themselves. Rather, they lend their ears and their noses to those who pay attention. In Holly Winter, dogs find an exceptionally enthusiastic and skilled borrower of ears and noses, a reader of dogs par excellence. She takes dogs seriously. She believes them. Just as I have never blessed her dogs with abilities beyond those that all dogs possess, so I've never given Holly an extrasensory or mystical power to read the canine mind. Why would I? She's a mind reader already.

  Susan Conant

  Newton, Massachusetts

  May 2011

  Acknowledgments

  With the exception of the Fishmonger and its proprietor, Dorothy Batchelder, who has kindly consented to a brief, anonymous guest appearance, all actual locations and institutions in this book are used fictitiously, and all characters are entirely imaginary.

  Many thanks once again to James Dalsimer, M.D., and Joel Woolfson, D.V.M. Any errors in human and canine medical matters are entirely my own fault.

  For expert instruction on the behavior of the Alaskan malamute, I am grateful to the great dog of my life, prima inter pares, Frostfield Arctic Natasha, C.D.

  A BITE OF DEATH

  1

  I was writing a story about a woman who died and came back to life as her own dog. What triggered the plot was a dream, and what triggered the dream was an article in the Boston Globe about a madman in Montreal who went berserk and shot thirteen women because he believed that feminists had ruined his life.

  I hadn't got far with my story because the dream was about the woman, not the dog, and I was more interested in him than in her. When the woman came back, did the dog have to leave? Or did they coexist? I liked that better. But, with the former owner dead, at least superficially, who owned the two of them? Someone had to. I couldn't leave them to roam the streets, defending themselves against marauding canine bullies, nosing through trash cans for maggot-ridden bits of bony fish and splintery chicken legs, curling up in the cold with their one black nose tucked under their one plumy white tail for warmth—they were an Alaskan malamute—and with no one to remember their heartworm medication or make sure their shots were up to date. Even in fiction, you see, a dog is inevitably my responsibility. I was the one who'd dreamed up this one, and I couldn't leave him—or her?—alone with no one but a recently deceased, internal, invisible, and hence probably self-preoccupied and irresponsible owner.

  Well, suppose it happened to me and mine: If I died and came back to life as my own dog, Rowdy, who should own us? Who better than myself? I am, in most respects, the perfect dog owner, and once I'd been reborn inside Rowdy's furry double coat and stubborn mind, we'd be the perfect dog as well. We'd have a head start on canine perfection: we'd already be an Alaskan malamute. And after my reincarnation, we'd have it made. For one thing, we'd henceforth come instantly when I called us. We'd quit stealing the sugar bowl from the kitchen table, licking it clean, and hiding it under the bedroom radiator. Our off-leash heeling would abruptly improve. We'd never lag on even the most sudden about-turn, and we'd look up at my face as if we were a dutiful golden retriever instead of the independent sled dog we knew ourselves to be. The three of us would make the perfect team, Rowdy and both of me.

  Really, though, the two of us, Rowdy and I, weren't so bad as we were, or, depending on how you count, the four of us. Rowdy. Me. The part of him that lives in me. The part of me that lives in him. That's what having a dog is all about. It's risking death. Give him your soul, and you die a little. Then you come back to life as your own dog. And it works both ways, which may explain why I'm only half human. I've given my soul to dozens of dogs, and they've all come back to life as me.

  It's a permanent situation that I didn't choose, although I would certainly have picked it if I'd been offered a choice. I never feel crowded, and I'm not allergic. I'm used to it. After all, it started in utero, or maybe even earlier, if you count the year
s before my conception, because my parents had been raising and training golden retrievers for a long time before it occurred to them to produce a litter that couldn't be registered with the American Kennel Club. Or maybe they thought mine could. Or maybe they planned to slip my registration form in with the ones for the two litters of goldens whelped just before me. It is even possible that they succeeded. I've never checked AKC's records for my own registration. Perhaps I'm there, Holly Winter, sired by Buck ex Marissa Winter, bitch.

  If you're new to dogdom, you might assume that in calling me a bitch, Buck and Marissa and the American Kennel Club would have been issuing a rude comment on my character, but that's not the case at all. For one thing, in the world of purebred dogs, bitch is a good clean word for female, and for another thing, the only bad name my parents ever called me was the one they gave me. The American Kennel Club has never had any reason to bad-mouth me, either. I don't handle my own dogs in breed anymore—that's conformation, the part of a dog show that's about looks, not behavior—but I've always shown in obedience. I still do. When I had goldens, we did well. And Rowdy? Since no one expects anything of an Alaskan malamute in obedience except maybe some big laughs, I'm as proud of putting a C.D. on him as I've been of putting U.D.'s on golden retrievers. C.D. and U.D. are obedience titles, of course. C.D. is Companion Dog. That's like a high school diploma. C.D.X., Companion Dog Excellent, is college. Utility Dog, U.D., is a Ph.D., except that it takes more time, work, and brains. For instance, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live, there are thousands of Ph.D.'s and practically no U.D.'s. That's why Cambridge is such a weird place. It has too many overeducated people and too many undereducated dogs.

  But I've digressed. As I was saying, instead of finishing my regular column for Dog's Life magazine, I was writing a story about a woman who died and came back as her own dog. The column was giving me trouble because it was about how to introduce a second dog into the household. The source of the trouble was an unshakable fear that Rowdy, who was asleep at my feet under the kitchen table, would read either my handwriting or my mind. If I'd transmitted the thought that I might die and come back to life as him, he wouldn't have objected at all, but the possibility of having to share his favorite sleeping spots, his owner's attention, and, God forbid, his food and water dishes with another dog would have brought his hackles up. And he'd almost certainly have realized that what I had in mind was not just any other dog, but another malamute.

  I went back to the story. Just as the woman was exhaling her last human breath, the phone interrupted me. The caller was Steve Delaney, Rowdy's vet and my lover.

  "Holly, you busy?"

  "I'm writing," I said.

  "I need a favor. It's an emergency, I guess you'd say." He laughed a little. "I'd go, but I can't. I'm an hour behind schedule, and the waiting room's full. You can handle this better, anyway—it's a behavior thing. A client's stuck on her kitchen table. That's where she called from. She's got a malamute bitch that won't let her get off the table. She didn't know who else to call."

  "Her first malamute, right?"

  "Right."

  "Is this a puppy?"

  "Not exactly, but young. Anyway, she hasn't had her very long. And it's her first dog."

  Getting a malamute as your first dog is like playing your first-ever basketball game as the Celtics entire starting five during a Pistons' home game. If you knew what you were doing, you wouldn't be doing it. A realistic aim is survival, not victory.

  "Okay. So where does she live?"

  "Upland Road." He gave me the number. "That's at your end of Upland, not the Mass. Ave. end."

  That part of Upland Road isn't far from my house, which is the three-story red triple-decker at the corner of Appleton Street and Concord Avenue, across Concord from the new Observatory Hill town houses that Harvard built as affordable faculty housing. The town houses range in price from $185,000 to $300,000. An assistant professor makes maybe $30,000 a year. There you have the relationship between Harvard and reality.

  "How am I supposed to get in if she can't get off the table?" I asked Steve.

  "She says there's a key in the milk box. Under the empty bottles. Stupid place to hide a key. As bad as leaving it under the mat."

  Actually, I used to leave my key under the mat before I had a milkman, which is to say, before I discovered that one of the luxuries Cambridge offers is the privilege of having milk delivered in real glass bottles that remind you of the kind your grandmother should have had instead of the waxy cartons and polluting plastic she did have. People always ask if the cream floats on the top, but it doesn't. It's plain old homogenized milk, but the eggs honestly are fresh, and the ice cream is pretty good, too.

  "I hate to rush you," Steve said, "but could you get over there soon? The bitch won't hurt her, but she doesn't know that. Her name's Elaine Walsh. The woman."

  "There aren't a lot of dogs named Elaine Walsh."

  He liked that. "The malamute's called, let's see, Kimi. She's about a year old. Real pretty. Very dominant. That's the problem. And she's a big bitch, for this part of the country."

  At a mere seventy to ninety pounds, the malamutes from the original New England strain—Kotzebues, they're called—are lapdogs compared with the hundred-and-thirty-pound mals you find elsewhere.

  "Is this the first time it's happened?" I asked.

  "First time she's called me. But, like I said, she hasn't had the bitch very long. It's complicated. It's a long story. I'll tell you about it later. Maybe she will. I've got to run."

  "I'm leaving now."

  "Good luck," he said. "Hey, thanks a lot. I'll see you tonight?"

  "Sure," I said. "If there's anything left of me."

  I was kidding. I'm not afraid of dogs.

  2

  Elaine Walsh's house had originally been a working-class triple-decker something like mine, the kind of house that my mother always disparaged as a tenement and that costs about $40,000 anywhere else and more than $100,000 in Cambridge—even before it's been renovated the way hers had been. Some architect had covered the facade with vertical strips of wood painted a pale Brattle Street yellow, screened in the front porch with the same strips, and divided the porch in half to make separate entrances and create the illusion that the building wasn't one house but two. When people in normal places say "my house," they mean just that, a whole house, but in Cambridge, they're apt to mean half a house or even a third or a fourth of a house. All that distinguishes these fractional houses from condominiums is separate entrances, like the one to Elaine Walsh's.

  The sidewalk in front and the short brick path that led to Elaine Walsh's entrance were covered with a thick coating of Halite that was melting the ice left by last night's sleet and ruining the soil in the railroad-tie beds of blackened marigold stalks on both sides of the brick. In an unintended effort to repair the salt damage, a large dog had made repeated applications of natural fertilizer.

  Inside the vertical-strip porch, to the left of the door, sat an insulated sheet-metal milk box just like the one at my back steps, a mottled dull-gray box with a schematic picture of a blue cow and "Pleasant Valley Farms" also painted in blue. Inside were two sluiced-out one-quart glass milk bottles, and under one was a key. In case Elaine Walsh had liberated herself, I rang the doorbell, but no one answered, and I let myself into a little entrance hall with a bentwood coatrack and a flight of stairs leading up.

  A series of low snarls greeted me.

  "Hello?" I called up the stairway. "Dr. Delaney sent me. Elaine? Miss Walsh? Are you okay?"

  "For God's sake, I thought you'd never get here. And it's 'Elaine' or 'Doctor,' not that damned 'Miss.'"

  I guessed right away that she wasn't a real doctor. Have you ever heard an M.D. give you a choice about what to call her? Besides, Cambridge is Cambridge. Most of the people called Doctor are only Ph.D.'s, and at least half of the M.D.'s are psychiatrists, anyway, which usually means that they never wanted to go to medical school in the first place and forgo
t everything they learned there as soon as they graduated. Of course, we do have a few real doctors, like Steve, who was my lover before he was Rowdy's vet. We met just after he took over from old Dr. Draper, when my last golden, Vinnie, was finally feeling more pain than she or I could endure. Steve stopped her pain. I've missed her and adored him ever since. And if you're sleeping with your vet, you get to use his first name.

  I unzipped my parka, shoved my gloves into one pocket, and extracted from another some of the tools of my trade: a metal training collar, a thin leather leash, and a small plastic squirt bottle filled with water. I primed the squirt bottle with a couple of squeezes.

  The stairs led me to a big, beautiful open room with a high-ceilinged living area ahead of me and a kitchen area to my left. Sitting in a cross-legged yoga posture on a butcher-block table was a strong-looking woman in her early thirties. She had short black hair and the kind of rugged, weathered face you expect on an archaeologist. I wondered whether she was one. In Cambridge, it's hard to tell. The Moroccan rugs on the floor, the African masks on the off-white walls, the Hopi pots displayed here and there, and the rough-woven Greek-peasant shirt she wore weren't necessarily clues to her occupation. Ethnic never goes out of style here. Neither do pale-painted walls. The locally educated inhabitants of Cambridge favor a decorative approach to cultural pluralism: touches of multicolored exotica against an all-white background. It's a preference they learned in school. For instance, three of Harvard's sixty-one tenured law professors are African-American.

  Anyway, maintaining that asana there on her kitchen table, Elaine Walsh looked Caucasian with ethnic aspirations and failed dignity, but her malamute looked congenitally Alaskan, and not at all silly until she quit growling at Elaine Walsh, ran over to me, hurled herself onto the floor, and presented me with a furry underbelly to rub. Rowdy greeted most visitors with the same display of suspicious reserve.