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  “Under and out,” I said.

  Mellie repeated the phrase.

  “When we find Strike, I’ll fix this for you,” I promised.

  Before Rowdy and I left, I wrote my name and phone number on a pad of paper next to Mellie’s phone. Whether or not she could read, the information was worth leaving. Mellie had people to help her, and one of them would presumably read my number for her if she needed to call me. We agreed that she’d let me know immediately if Strike returned. I promised to do what I could to find the missing Siberian.

  Pulling out of Mellie’s driveway, I saw that the official vehicles no longer blocked the street. A small group of people had gathered on the sidewalk, but I had no desire even to pass by and drove in the other direction. Preoccupied with Mellie, I’d managed to blot out the image of the body on the tiles. It now returned to me. She had had my slim build. Her hair had been medium length, its color a pale brown with maybe a hint of red, a familiar shade, one that occurs in golden retrievers. Or so my father has always insisted. It is, in other words, the color of my own hair.

  CHAPTER 6

  As soon as I got home, I called Francie to tell her about the murder and to inquire about Mellie’s safety. Our conversation was brief. “Mellie won’t open the door to strangers, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Francie assured me. “And she has good locks. Once Mellie masters a routine, she follows it. She always locks up. I’ll break the news to her about what happened. She won’t see it on the news. She watches TV, but mainly sitcoms and children’s shows, a few animal programs, and she doesn’t listen to the radio. Or read the newspaper, of course. News upsets her. Well, it upsets me, too. She can read, sort of, but she doesn’t. I mean, she can print her name, and she can read words on signs and packages, stuff like that, but that’s it. I wondered whether she might like reading children’s books, but I tried a few, and I got nowhere. I’m sure she had unhappy experiences in school. The printed word makes her feel inadequate. In any case, one of us can always stay there tonight. Sorry, but I have to run.” Her tone suggested urgency. “Our preschool is a media-free zone, and one of the toddlers keeps showing up in a Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt.”

  Cambridge. It’s worse than D.C.—one political crisis after another. Just let Thomas the Tank Engine chug his media-laden way across the city limits, and we’ll face inevitable assault by the armies of Batman, Superman, the Power Rangers, the entire cast of Toy Story, and that notorious antifeminist empress herself, Barbie, who’ll wear either her Joan of Arc outfit or her cute little U.S. Marines uniform, but will waste precious hours deciding between the two, thus giving us time to erect our fortifications of anatomically correct and racially unidentifiable dolls, unembellished blocks, Lincoln Logs, LEGOs, unpainted wooden trains, jars of finger paint, pads of blank paper, and other toys designed to challenge the imagination, boost IQs, and instill in our children the extreme tolerance for unrelenting boredom so vital to success in today’s academic world.

  It was now quarter of five. I placed quick calls to the animal control officers of Cambridge, Arlington, Somerville, and Belmont, on all of whose voice mail I left my name, my phone number, and the message that a female Siberian husky had been lost near Rindge Avenue in Cambridge. Since Strike had been missing for only a short time, it was premature, I decided, to post flyers and to enlist the aid of the world’s greatest finder of lost dogs, the Internet. As we say here in Cambridge, think globally, act locally.

  Instead of cooking, I ran down the street to Formaggio, a gourmet shop principally renowned for delicious cheeses from all over the world but also notable for fruits, vegetables, and flowers and for rotisserie chicken that has the distinction of not tasting like those freeze-dried poultry strips sold as dog treats. I arrived home to find Kevin Dennehy at my back door. For a person with red hair, blue eyes, fair skin, freckles, and a friendly manner, he is remarkably reminiscent of a silver-back male gorilla. He has the same massive build, including the muscular shoulders, and he sometimes lets his arms swing down as if he were contemplating quadrupedal locomotion, but the main point of likeness is Kevin’s peculiar ability to combine an air of authority with an attitude of curiosity. Kevin would strangle me for describing him as cute, but cute he can be.

  To my amazement, Kevin skipped his usual formulaic greeting (“Hey, Holly, how ya doing?”) and said, “Christ, am I glad to see you. I thought you were dead.”

  “Reports were greatly exaggerated,” I said. “Kevin, I have to feed the dogs, and then I have dog training, but if you’re hungry, I’ve got chicken that I’ll be glad to share.”

  Five minutes later, Kevin was seated at my kitchen table with a can of Bud in front of him and his massive hands clamped over his ears. As I’ve said, he’s cute. The gesture was, however, practical and justified: I was feeding Rowdy, Kimi, and Sammy, which is to say, three exemplary specimens of the most stunningly beautiful, inventively brilliant, and passionately food-driven breed ever to set gorgeous snowshoe paw on the fortunate planet Earth. Rowdy and Kimi were hitched to doors at opposite ends of the kitchen, Sammy was in a wire crate, I was dribbling safflower oil onto a combination of Eagle Pack and EVO in three stainless steel bowls, and all three dogs were screaming, screeching, hollering, bellowing, and bouncing up and down as if their last meal had been weeks ago instead of a mere ten hours earlier. Ages ago, I’d read the report of a small study that compared the behavior of malamute puppies and wolf cubs. Whereas the little wolves showed a healthy interest in meals, the baby malamutes went nuts around the food dish. That’s my paraphrase, of course, but the point is that instead of saying that voracious eaters wolf down dinner, we really ought to say that they malamute it down. Anyway, to show my understanding and respect for the pack hierarchy, I fed Rowdy first, then Kimi, then Sammy. By the time Kimi’s bowl hit the floor, Rowdy was flat on his belly with his dish gripped between his front paws and his face in his dinner, and by the time I’d slipped Sammy’s food into his crate and shut its door, Rowdy’s bowl was empty. To someone accustomed to normal dogs, malamute mealtimes can be a shock, but Kevin was used to the madness, which was over in almost no time.

  I then let Rowdy and Kimi out into the yard, let Sammy out of his crate, and joined Kevin at the table. “What must’ve happened,” I said, “was that someone confused the name of that poor woman with the name of the person who found the body. Me. Holly Winter. I’m sorry you thought—”

  “It wasn’t that,” Kevin said. “It was the ID.”

  “The other Holly Winter. So that’s who it is! The poor woman! Kevin, what a weird coincidence. Actually, it’s the second one today. The second mix-up. This is freakish. Some guy on a motorcycle was here looking for her. No wonder he was having trouble finding her. Now I know why.”

  Kevin said, “I thought you didn’t believe in coincidence.”

  “I don’t.” I paused. “Usually.”

  The theory is that behind every so-called coincidence lies a series of connections, some small, some large, that, if traced back far enough, lead inevitably to the great source of meaning and purpose in this otherwise senseless universe, namely, dogs. As a theory, this one may not initially seem to be right up there with relativity, for example, or evolution by means of natural selection, but I have seen its predictive value demonstrated countless times throughout my life and thus should have known better than to append that foolish usually.

  “I knew she lived in Cambridge,” I said. “The other Holly Winter. Kevin, this is so horrible. I wandered back there, behind that house, looking for someone’s lost dog, and when I saw…it was sickening. Her body was right by the door, just on the other side of the glass door. Everything had been thrown around. Anyway, when this biker was here, I looked up her address for him, but it was off Kirkland Street. She must’ve moved. I used an old phone book. I’ve never met her, but I know a little bit about her. We had the same doctor for a while, and one time I called, and the doctor said, ‘Well, well, how’s the bladder infection?’ I didn’t
have one. She did. She had something to do with Harvard—a graduate student or a lecturer or something like that. I am so sorry!”

  “It isn’t her house,” Kevin said. “It looks like she was house-sitting. There’s a suitcase and some clothes in one of the bedrooms. And long lists about taking care of tropical fish. Instructions.”

  “The tanks had been broken. Knocked over.”

  “Some of them. There’s more all over the place.”

  “Whose house is it?”

  “A doctor. Young guy. Dr. Ho. He’s in Africa with some kind of medical group.”

  “This is going to sound irrelevant, but do you happen to know a woman named Mellie who lives right near there? Two houses away.”

  Kevin grew up in Cambridge and knows half the city. “Mellie O’Leary.” He smiled. “My mother knows her. Knew her parents.”

  “Mellie is the reason I was there. She was taking care of someone’s Siberian. The dog got loose, and I was trying to help. I’m not supposed to have told you that, by the way. Mellie is terrified of the police. She does pet-sitting, dog walking, in a minor way, and she thinks she’ll get arrested for not having a license. Anyway, Mellie is the reason I was there. She was taking care of a dog that got loose. But the point is…Mellie is…I guess the word is simpleminded. The woman who called me about helping to find the dog says that Mellie locks up and that the neighbors watch out for her, but is she okay there? She lives alone, and it’s only two houses away. Was this murder, uh, personal? Or…?”

  “Looks like a search for something. Probably something small. This Dr. Ho’s got a good sound system, and that wasn’t touched. New computer’s there. He’s a whatchamacallit, social justice type, believes in simple living. It wasn’t some junkie who’d’ve grabbed anything.”

  I nodded. “I saw the food on the floor. Things that had been dumped. So, are you assuming that he thought the house was empty and that Holly Winter surprised him? While he was searching for something.”

  Kevin shrugged. “Hey, don’t ask me. I just found out it wasn’t you.”

  Over our hurried dinner of rotisserie chicken, I tried to pump Kevin for additional information, but if Kevin knew more, he wasn’t saying it.

  CHAPTER 7

  Unbeknownst to me, the other Holly Winter, she who once had a bladder infection, far from having been shot to death while fish-sitting for Dr. Ho, still lives—and still lives where I thought she did, off Kirkland Street. The address had made me imagine her in grand surroundings. Julia Child’s kitchen, now in the Smithsonian, was dismantled and removed from a house in that neighborhood. The late John Kenneth Galbraith, author of The Affluent Society, lived there. How convenient for him! To study personal wealth in American society, he merely had to stroll around the block.

  But Holly Winter, this other Holly Winter, does not occupy one of the grand old places. Elsewhere she might be said to rent a garage apartment, but since her abode is a short walk from the academic center of the American universe, which is to say, anywhere but elsewhere, she lives on the second floor of a renovated carriage house. Or does she? After a summer in England, she refers to the second story of the not-a-garage as the first floor and takes care never to say apartment when flat can be put to use.

  Her taste is minimalist: simple blinds, no curtains, sleek black couch and chairs, no throw pillows, black filing cabinets, no piles of paper, hardwood floors, no rugs, hundreds of books neatly aligned on bookshelves, no paintings, no prints, no pieces of sculpture, no photographs, certainly no snapshots, and nothing even remotely like geegaws or tchotchkes. She now sits at her teak desk, its surface clear except for her notebook computer, the screen of which displays a document she is drafting for the CAMP, the Cambridge Alliance for Media-free Preschools, an organization that she has recently begun to support by serving on the group’s advisory board. To her annoyance, instead of merely being asked to advise, she has been asked to contribute by analyzing data from a study intended to evaluate the impact of a media-free policy on children in participating preschools and day-care centers. As is invariably the case with projects inspired and implemented by idealistic reformer-educators, the design of the so-called study is a mess, principally because the statistician, Holly Winter, this Holly Winter, was called in only after the data had been collected. Even so, she approves of CAMP’s goals. Surely the world is improved by stripping away this ghastly media trash and giving the imagination free rein! Also, she approves of the membership of the CAMP Advisory Board, including as it does Zach Ho, a Harvard classmate of hers, a man with just the sort of keen intelligence that attracts her most.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Cambridge Dog Training Club meets at the Cambridge Armory, which is on Concord Avenue near the Fresh Pond rotary. The club serves a wide area, but a fair number of Cantabrigians attend classes, so I decided to ask around to see whether anyone knew Mellie. Instead of training one of my own dogs, I worked at the desk as people checked in. Then I helped to teach the puppy kindergarten and the beginners’ class. Since this was the first Thursday after Labor Day, it was the first night of training after the summer break. The desk was busy because of all the new people signing up and paying, so I felt useful. I put a little notice about Strike on the desk, but no one responded to it. The classes weren’t as much fun as you might imagine because the club asks handlers to leave the puppies and the beginner dogs at home for the first meeting. The first day of school can be as exciting and stressful for dogs as it is for children, but dogs, of course, respond by barking, and if they’re present, it can be almost impossible to communicate basic information to the handlers. Still, I had a good time and even managed to find a couple of people who knew Mellie. Both of them said that she was a sweet person who genuinely loved animals and who did some informal pet-sitting, dog walking, and boarding. One of the people knew Mellie from St. Peter’s Parish, which is a Roman Catholic church on Concord Avenue, a few blocks from my house as you head toward Harvard Square. It seemed to me that there had to be a church closer to Mellie’s house than St. Peter’s, but when I said just that, I learned that although Mellie sometimes attended Mass elsewhere, she remained a regular at St. Peter’s, in part because she was used to it, and in part because one of the priests there, Father McArdle, had promised her parents that he’d look out for her and had kept his promise. Mellie, I remembered, had mentioned the name.

  I got home to find a message from Steve on the machine. “I know you’re at dog training,” he said in that deep, calm voice I adore, “but my cell’s not working much here, and I managed to get through, so I thought I’d tell you that we’re okay. We’re fine. We’re great. I love you.” My effort to return the call was useless, but I did leave a message. I said nothing about the murder. If Steve knew that a woman named Holly Winter had been shot to death in Cambridge, he’d inevitably worry. He worked tremendously hard and deserved this vacation. I’d tell him everything when he got home.

  I could not, of course, protect myself from knowledge of the murder, but the remembered sound of Steve’s voice soothed me to sleep, as did the thought that Leah would return in an hour or two and that I wouldn’t be alone in the house. Not that I was. All three dogs were in the bedroom with me, Sammy in his crate, Kimi the bed hog jammed next to me, and my ever-hopeful Rowdy curled up on the floor beneath the silent air conditioner. In the morning, I awakened with the thought that Holly Winter wasn’t all that unusual a name and that people with really popular names must get used to having their namesakes murdered all the time. If I were Mary Kelly or Lisa Johnson, it would still have been eerie to come upon the body of a woman with the same name, much weirder than merely reading about her death in the newspaper, but the principle was identical, and meaningless coincidences did occur, that is, coincidences that were just that and not dog-meaningful reminders to hunt for hidden patterns and obscure interconnections. Furthermore, I had a busy day and, indeed, a busy weekend ahead, with no time to reread Conrad’s The Secret Sharer or otherwise to dwell on the creepy matte
r of doppelgangers.

  By the time Leah got up, I had fed the dogs, done my morning chores, taken a shower, and called Mellie. Strike had not returned. Consequently, I’d posted messages about her to all of my malamute e-mail lists and the lists for dog writers, with the request that my posts be forwarded to other lists. I’d also prepared and printed copies of a lost-dog flyer that gave my phone number and promised a reward. Leah got up at nine and arrived in the kitchen with her curly red-gold hair damp from the shower and piled on top of her head in a sort of bohemian beehive. She looked perfectly lovely and entirely innocent of such crimes as giving Harley-riding strangers the run of my house. I toasted an English muffin for her and gave her a cup of coffee. Then I told her about the previous day.

  “You were looking for a lost dog and you found a dead body?”

  “Bodies are dead bodies,” I said.

  “And her name was Holly Winter? That’s…after the guy on the Harley was looking for her?”

  “I told Kevin about that. But she’d been dead for…I don’t know. Days, I think. The biker couldn’t have left here and then murdered her. And it really has nothing to do with me. I’ll know more tonight. Kevin and I are having dinner. Until then, I’m just going to stay busy. I’m taking Rowdy and Sammy to the LaundroMutt. They’re both entered tomorrow. After the show, Buck and Gabrielle are coming back here. They’re staying here Saturday night.”