The Barker Street Regulars Page 4

  “But she’s as bright as ever. She was always the smart one. George, our brother, was the practical one.”

  “And you’ve always been the pretty one?” I smiled.

  Ceci beamed. Then her face, which really was pretty, turned grave. As the elevator doors opened and we stepped in, she said, “The one who never gets taken seriously. Simon, for example. When I lost my Simon, all I heard from everyone but Althea was ‘only a dog.’” She repeated the phrase. “‘Only a dog.’”

  Ceci and Rowdy and I were alone in the elevator. “I understand about Simon,” I said impulsively. “Sometimes I still miss my Vinnie in the same way.”

  “Is he still with you?”

  “She,” I corrected. “Yes, she is.” It was painful to talk about Vinnie, and the more vividly I sensed her presence, the more painful it became. I rested a hand on Rowdy’s head. He entered my life soon after Vinnie died. He did not replace her. Rather, he came to me as my personal therapy dog.

  Placing a gentle little hand on my arm, Ceci said, “They aren’t gone, you know.”

  “They are and they aren’t. I always remind myself that all Vinnie did was die. She didn’t stop loving me.” It was a moment of odd intimacy. As the elevator reached the first floor and the doors opened, Ceci dug into her purse, found a packet of tissues, and handed me one. I blew my nose.

  “I’ve upset you,” she said. “There’s no need, really. Until six months ago, I felt the same way. Since then, I have had the great comfort of communicating with Simon and knowing for certain that his abiding presence is more than a lonely woman’s foolish hope.”

  I cleared my throat. “I need to sign out and get my raincoat. It was very nice to meet—”

  “Oh, I’ll come with you.” As I returned my little volunteer’s badge to its place on a bulletin board in the office, signed out, and retrieved my raincoat, Ceci went on and on. Simon spoke to her, she informed me. It was a great comfort, she said again, to receive messages from Simon. I couldn’t help wondering, of course, whether Ceci also communicated with her late husband, Ellis. If not, didn’t the man’s spirit sense her preferential treatment of the dog? Weren’t his feelings hurt? But I lacked the courage to ask.

  On the way out, we passed through the lobby, and I managed to shake Ceci for a couple of minutes so that Rowdy and I could say goodbye to the people gathered there, but she waited and trailed me through the doors to the parking lot. Ceci kept assuring me that what the unenlightened mistook for death was, in fact, a state of trance. Meanwhile, Rowdy devoted himself to what I assume is the exclusively earthly activity of making repeated passes at a shrub near my car and finally drenching it. The male dog’s question about eternity: Is there pee after death? I did not ask Ceci whether she’d interrogated Simon on the subject. Simon, she said, told her that he was happy running and playing. Was that what Vinnie told me?

  “My, uh, beliefs stop a little short of yours,” I confessed.

  “But there’s no need!” Ceci cried.

  “There seems to be for me.”

  “You do sense her presence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you able to speak with her?”

  I seldom discussed the subject. I especially avoided it when my friend and second-floor tenant, Rita, was around. Rita is a clinical psychologist. She already thinks that everyone is insane and doesn’t need any supporting evidence from me. “Well, I, uh, I say things to her,” I stammered. Vinnie was a golden retriever. She was my great obedience dog. She had a temperament from the heaven to which she has returned. Goldens are eager to please, but they aren’t necessarily brilliant. Vinnie was. She was quick, insightful, observant, and intuitive. Nonetheless, when she was here with me, our verbal exchanges were a trifle one-sided, and the balance hadn’t shifted since her demise.

  Ceci shook her head sadly. “They have so much to share with us!”

  “Vinnie gave me everything,” I said in her defense.

  “You’d give anything, wouldn’t you,” said Ceci, “to see her again.”

  With no hesitation, I said, “Yes. Anything.”

  “With the help of the gifted, our loved ones approach closer all the time.” With a knowing nod, she extracted an ivory business card from her purse and pressed it on me. Then she made her way to a beige Mercedes.

  I looked at the card. IRENE WHEELER, it read, ANIMAL COMMUNICATOR. The address was in Cambridge.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said to Rowdy. “Irene Wheeler.”

  The animal psychic? The quack consulted by Gloria and Scott? Irene Wheeler.

  I am an animal communicator. Ask Rowdy. Ask Kimi. For that matter, ask Vinnie. If you love your dog, you are an animal communicator. Steve Delaney is an animal communicator. For instance, he’d communicated Gigi’s need to be spayed. But Irene Wheeler, Animal Communicator? No, no, no. Irene Wheeler, Charlatan.

  Chapter Five

  FIVE DAYS LATER, EARLY on Friday morning, I was tempted to call the Gateway to offer some trumped-up excuse to postpone our visit. I’d slept restlessly and awakened with a sense of obligations unfulfilled. Besides having to earn a living, I had to keep a dentist appointment in Newton, and I had to groom both dogs for a show the next day. I always shampoo and blow dry them before a show to make their coats really stand off their bodies, the way the standard says. The standard also says that malamutes are to be evaluated principally on the basis of their original function as sledge dogs. Whenever I get the dogs ready for a show, I feel sorry for the generations of Arctic dwellers who relied on these dogs to act as canine moving vans. What those people must have gone through to make sure the dogs would pull! I mean, unless you spend a terrible amount of time with a forced-air dryer and a brush, your dog doesn’t stand a chance in the ring, so I assume that all this fluffiness the judges like must be absolutely crucial to the breed’s ability to haul heavy freight. But then I thought of Gus, Nancy, and the others, Althea of course, and Helen, and I made my apologies to Kimi and took Rowdy to the Gateway.

  The drive there was dismal. Everything, including the sky, was the color of dirt. Mats of leaves rotted in the gutters. Nature and artifice had cooperated to litter people’s yards with broken tree branches and with scraps of sodden paper and torn plastic. The streets were thick with ice-melting chemicals and sand. Loose black sticky nuggets of asphalt lay everywhere except in the potholes they were supposed to fill. At the edges of parking lots, icy mountains of filth lingered: the unsettled graves of dead snow.

  The Gateway was in Cambridge near the Belmont line, only a short drive from my house, which is the three-story red wooden one at the corner of Appleton and Concord. The Gateway was a new facility constructed of brick, concrete, and plate glass, and surrounded by foundation plantings of evergreens and rhododendrons in beds mulched with wood chips. For the previous week, we’d had mild, rainy weather, a sort of winter mud season, but last night the temperature had dropped thirty degrees, and the Gateway’s parking lot was thick with fresh sand and chemicals that I tried to brush off Rowdy’s feet and underbelly before we entered the lobby, which was the brightest and most cheerful place I’d seen that day.

  Only one of our lobby regulars was there. In the adjoining dining hall, a man in green work clothes was running a floor-polisher over the linoleum, and the ten-thirty exercise group hadn’t begun yet. At the Gateway, the day always started late. I’d been asked never to arrive before ten-thirty, when the last breakfast trays were cleared and when most people would have been bathed and dressed. When I signed in and pinned on my badge, I realized that my sweater was a depressingly colorless gray. I wished I’d worn red and tied a bright bandanna around Rowdy’s neck. A staff member bustled by and, in passing, confirmed my impression that everything was running behind schedule today.

  “Where are your friends today?” I asked the lone woman in the lobby.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Where is everyone?”

  “Not dressed yet, I guess,” I answered. “I’m glad you’re here. Rowdy would
be disappointed if he didn’t get to visit.”

  Even after we’d spent some time with her, the morning activities in the dining hall still hadn’t begun, so I decided to move up to the third floor and catch our first-floor people later. When we stepped off the elevator, I had to lead Rowdy around a man who was washing the floor. Someone was stacking trays of dirty dishes on a big cart. The TV room was empty except for a woman I’d never met before. Although she smiled pleasantly at Rowdy, when I asked whether she liked dogs, she said no, not big dogs, just little ones. Back in the corridor, Rowdy headed for 319, Nancy’s room. We found the door shut. Rowdy whined softly, and I had to remind him not to paw at it and scratch the paint. A closed door, I’d learned, meant that one or both occupants were being bathed, dressed, or given some kind of medical treatment. I’d been told that it was all right to knock and wait for a reply, but I didn’t want to bother anyone who might be attending to Nancy or her roommate, and I didn’t want to violate anyone’s privacy.

  “We’ll come find Nancy later,” I told Rowdy. “She’ll tell you how beautiful you are, won’t she? And you’ll give her a big kiss.” She’d also moan and call out his name, and she’d have to be prevented from encouraging him to jump on her bed, where, I feared, he might accidentally crush her tiny frame, but neither her wailing nor her frailty would bother Rowdy. “I promise,” I said. “She won’t want to miss you, either. We’ll come back later.”

  Having visited hardly anyone, we took the elevator to the fifth floor. There I was relieved to find Helen and Althea dressed for the day and eager to see Rowdy. Helen Musgrave interrupted her ritual sorting of the contents of her bulletin board to shake hands with Rowdy and then departed to attend some activity or event. Despite the darkness of the day, the morning light that came through the big window bathed Althea’s face and made her look a hundred years old, but she was even more animated than usual, and crowed to Rowdy in a fashion that reminded me of her sister, Ceci. The cause of her excitement, I learned, was the prospect of a visit from her grandnephew, her late brother George’s grandson. Jonathan lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he taught mathematics at Macalester College. Jonathan’s father, George’s only child, had died a number of years before. Except for Ceci, Althea said, Jonathan was her only living relative. He had called on Wednesday. The call alone, I saw, had been a treat for Althea. Jonathan was arriving in Boston on Saturday, tomorrow, and would stay with Ceci. Althea was getting her hair done this afternoon, and her nails, too. “Not that it matters,” Althea commented, “but at my age, special occasions are to be treasured and are well worth a celebration.” Just how excited was Althea about Jonathan’s visit? She was so keyed up that she mentioned Sherlock Holmes only once, and the mention was no more than a passing allusion. Jonathan, she said with amusement, was interested in the binomial theorem, but she didn’t hold it against him.

  “Professor Moriarty?” I asked. Holmes’s archenemy, the criminal genius.

  “Ex-Professor Moriarty,” said Althea, but I could tell that she was pleased in spite of my little mistake.

  As I hope I’ve made clear, the visit had not a single premonitory or paranormal feature. If telepathic signals had been flashing, I might have failed to receive them. Animals, however, especially companion animals, are widely credited with psychic powers beyond those of mere human beings, and since Rowdy is an extraordinary dog in every earthly respect, I assume that he must also be able to hold his own against the competition when it comes to occult gifts. But his behavior was perfectly normal.

  After I’d wished Althea a good visit with her grand-nephew, I went back down to the third floor, let Rowdy say hi to a few new people, and spent a little time with Gus. Nancy still wasn’t in the corridor or the TV room, so we again made our way to 319. This time, the door was open. Long blue curtains were drawn around the bed near the door. I didn’t know the name of Nancy’s roommate, whose bed it was. I’d just seen her lying there looking weak, ill, and vacant. Whenever I’d spoken to her, even loudly and clearly, she hadn’t responded at all. I hadn’t persisted. If there’d been ten of Rowdy and ten of me, we’d probably still have shortchanged the people who could have benefited from a therapy dog. As it was, I reserved Rowdy for people like Nancy.

  Rowdy knew before I did. Instead of rushing bright-eyed toward Nancy’s bed, he sized up the situation, turned around, and tried to head out the door. Her bed was not curtained off. It was stripped bare. Nancy’s bulletin board, identical to Helen’s and everyone else’s, showed only a random pattern of small holes left by the pins that had held up notices she hadn’t read and photographs she hadn’t looked at. Her water pitcher, her drinking glass, her box of tissues, and her other possessions were missing from her nightstand. The wide windowsill, identical to the one where Althea kept her Sherlockiana, held nothing and looked as if it had just been washed. Nancy owned two embroidered pillows that usually sat on the two chairs near her bed. The pillows were gone. So were Nancy’s two stuffed animals, a fuzzy dog of an unidentifiable breed and a gray squirrel that played a tune when you turned a key. Her wheelchair wasn’t there. I was as baffled as I’d have been if the Gateway had been a boarding school, a summer camp, or a college dormitory. Rowdy, who’d known immediately, pulled toward the door. I let him lead me to the corridor, where I stood in a daze for a few seconds until a man in white, a nurse, spotted me and asked, “Nancy?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Lowering his voice, the man said gently, “Expired.”

  The word didn’t register; I simply did not understand it. “What?” I demanded.

  “Nancy expired this morning,” he said.

  Far too loudly, I said in amazement, “Nancy died?”

  The man was kind. “She was ninety-three. She was very frail.”

  I signed out, returned my badge, and even managed to exchange a few words with the people in the lobby. Still reeling, I drove to Newton Corner and spent a miserable half hour in the dentist’s chair. When I left, instead of taking the fast route home along Soldiers Field Road, I impulsively took the little North Beacon Street Bridge, cut across to the Watertown and the Cambridge side of the river, and turned onto what’s rather grandly called Greenough Boulevard, but is a narrow, unpretentious road that runs along the Charles River. That section of the boulevard is a parkway, I suppose. Trees, weedy bushes, and a chain-link fence separate it from a vast parking lot and a long stretch of massive brick buildings that used to be a federal arsenal. Large parts of the old arsenal are now a shopping mall. One building houses a health maintenance organization. Another has become an apartment complex. The old arsenal is, however, uphill from the river and almost out of sight, at least if you don’t look for it, and in warm weather, Greenough Boulevard gives a pretty view of the river, provided that you keep your eyes on the water and not on the far bank, unless, of course, your idea of a pretty view is an International House of Pancakes, a discount office supply store, and Martignetti’s Liquors. But I’m not the only one to find the little stretch of road appealing, at least by city standards. There are small parking areas and, by the water, wooden benches. Even in good weather, people sit alone in their cars sipping coffee from cardboard cups. I always imagine that these are unhappy spouses who don’t want to go home and have nowhere else to go but Greenough Boulevard. The car-proud spend hours there polishing their vehicles with paste wax. The athletic skate on the sidewalk, ride bikes, or jog. Lots of people walk dogs there. In the spring, Harvard, Northeastern, and other local university crew teams practice on that stretch of the river, and recreational rowers propel one-person shells through the water. Kevin Dennehy, my cop friend and neighbor, distrusts the area. He maintains that it is a dangerous place for a woman. He’s warned me never to go there alone even with my big dogs.

  On a cold Friday afternoon, in full daylight, though, I felt perfectly comfortable in driving along the road. Rowdy was in his crate in the back of the car, but if the engine quit, I could get him out and walk safely to a telephone. Kevin was
wrong, I reflected. He knew Rowdy so well that he’d forgotten how the dog appears to strangers. Despite the recent warm spell, patches of ice floated on the river. It was too early in the season for crew practice and much too cold to sit on the benches. No one was skating. I passed a solitary cyclist headed in the other direction. That’s how I thought of the woman, as a solitary cyclist. The phrase was Conan Doyle’s. It was the title of a story. A ragged couple pushed a shopping cart that probably contained everything they owned. Nancy’s belongings wouldn’t have filled half the cart. She’d been ninety-three. And frail. Althea was only ninety. How old was that French woman, Jeanne Calment? A hundred and twenty? Althea could easily have another thirty years. Helen Musgrave could have forty or more. Gus, my lobby ladies, all the others? I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I’d only been alerted, I could have rushed Rowdy to the Gateway, and Nancy would still be alive.

  Parked in a turnout was a dark panel truck, a van with no windows except the two by the front seats and, of course, the windshield. My eye caught the flash of something white near the riverbank. I naturally assumed that it was a dog and slowed down to see what kind. My brain cells identify any unknown object as canine. I’m always easing on the brakes to get a good look at paper bags blowing in the wind. But there was no wind today, and the white object wasn’t at ground level, but in the hands of a tall, lean man standing by the river and wrestling in a peculiar, scary-looking way with what I now saw was definitely not a white dog. Still, the white thing wiggled and squirmed in a way that looked animate. Kevin’s warnings about this stretch of Greenough Boulevard had made me suspicious. And I was mindful of death. The man had a furtive look. The white thing was struggling. At the risk of making a fool of myself, I pulled over, slammed on the brakes, cut the engine, and, leaving Rowdy in his crate, leaped out of the car without even closing the door. As I sprinted toward the man, I yelled, “Hey, what are you doing?”