All Shots

A DOG LOVER’S MYSTERY

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

Copyright © 2007 by Susan Conant.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conant, Susan, 1946–
    All shots / Susan Conant.—1st ed.
       p. cm.
   ISBN: 1-4295-5610-2
   1. Winter, Holly (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women dog owners—Fiction. 3. Dog
trainers—Fiction. 4. Cambridge (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title

   PS3553.O4857A79 2007
   813'.54—dc22 2007020308

To Lynne and Dan Anderson
in memory of their beloved Stocker,
Ch. Grey Czar’s Blue Chip Stock
(December 31, 1993–August 2, 2006),
the perfect malamute.

Many thanks to Alaskan malamute Benchmark Heart’s Desire and to Heart’s devoted breeder-owner-handler, Phyllis Hamilton, for appearing in this book. Special thanks to Phyllis for talking with me about blue malamutes. I am also grateful to the late Jim Hamilton and to his delightful blue malamute, Benchmark Excalibur, called Steely Dan. Thanks, too, to my own malamute, Django (Jazzland’s Got That Swing); to his breeder, Cindy Neely; and to Roseann Mandell and Geoff Stern; and to Jean Berman, Jessica Fry, Loulie Kent, Pat Sullivan, Margherita Walker, Anya Wittenborg, Suzanne Wymelenberg, and Corinne Zipps.

I returned home on that wet September afternoon to
find in my driveway a Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glide, a luxury road machine with power, pizzazz, and personality. It was outfitted with a myriad of snazzy features and accessories: heat shields, foot-boards, hardbags, compartments, racks, carriers, and a heavily padded seat with backrests for both driver and passenger. The chrome and the silver and the black leather glistened in the mist. The beast had a tinted wind deflector for a forehead, a big headlight muzzle, and for eyes, smaller lamps so clear and alive that they almost seemed to return my gaze, thereby confirming my sense that the two of us, the Harley and I, had not simply met before but knew each other in some deep and even mystical way. My soul mates, you see, are Alaskan malamutes, the ultimate canine touring models, Heaven’s Devils, all power, pizzazz, and personality, the Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glides of purebred dogdom. Even so, what in Hells Angels was this vehicular malamute doing in my driveway?

My name is Holly Winter. I live at 256 Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ZIP code: 02138; the
right
one, as it’s said, presumably by virtue of being shared with the alma mater of Ted Kaczynski, whose name is intoned in awed tones around here not because he was the Unabomber but because he was a Harvard math major. After all, how much intelligence does it take to be a psychotic multiple murderer? But to graduate from Harvard with a degree in mathematics?
That
takes brains. Cambridge, my Cambridge.

The Harley had a Maine license plate. I grew up in God’s Country, the beautiful state of Maine. My father and my stepmother lived there, but Buck and Gabrielle never left home without their dogs, so the bike definitely wasn’t theirs. I ruled out my husband on the grounds that he, too, would never buy a vehicle that failed to provide room for his dogs. Besides, he was canoeing in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. With him were two of our five dogs: Lady, his pointer, and India, his German shepherd bitch,
bitch
being a good, clean word in the dialect of the dog fancy, meaning, as it does, female, unless preceded by the words
son of a
, in which case it means the same thing in the dog world as it does everywhere else. So, as the owner of the Harley, Steve was out. A Harvard classmate of my cousin Leah’s? A few Harvard students had motorcycles, the men presumably to show that Harvard men could be real men, too. And the women? In a few cases, maybe to prove the same thing. Leah, with her red-gold curls, would’ve looked even more spectacular than usual on the Harley, but she, too, would’ve rejected any mode of transport that excluded big dogs, and in any case, she was chronically broke.

So, when I let myself into the kitchen, I half expected to find Leah there with a classmate whose early and middle adolescence had been exclusively devoted to conforming to the highest expectations of the Harvard Admissions Committee and who was now staging a belated, if normal, adolescent rebellion by becoming the reincarnation of James Dean. My cousin was, however, nowhere in sight. Seated at my kitchen table was a big, tall, handsome man with strong features that made him look like Michelangelo’s statue of Moses and thus like Charlton Heston as Moses, too, but with the broad forehead, the oversized eye sockets, and the prominent nose of the marble version. The biker lacked the horns of Michelangelo’s Moses, of course, and if he was playing Moses at all, it was a beardless Moses at age thirty or so, a Moses with dark curly hair. It’s possible that my brilliant dogs discerned the resemblance. Having evidently cast themselves as the children of Israel stunned by the wondrous sight of the tablets, Rowdy and Kimi had prostrated themselves before the man, which is to say that they were on their backs with their white tummies exposed and their white snowshoe paws waving in the air. The pose ordinarily represents nothing more than a demand for a belly rub, but it’s important never to underestimate Kimi, whose accomplishments in a previous existence probably include a degree in mathematics from that place down the street. In fact, my first thought about how the biker had entered my house was that Kimi had let him in. Impossible! It was, I feared, remotely possible that she had figured out how to open the back door, but I was sure that she hadn’t learned to unlock it. My second thought was that the uninvited visitor—intruder?—had found the key that I kept hidden under one of the trash barrels. Equally impossible. Absolutely no one but me knew about it. Even Steve didn’t know.

“Holly Winter?” the man asked. “Hope I didn’t startle you.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I habitually walk into my house to find strange men in black rain gear dripping puddles onto the floor. The phenomenon bothered me at first, but I’m used to it now.”

He rose and extended a big mitt of a hand. “Adam.”

What came to mind was the palindrome:
Madam, I’m Adam
. It even put a nervous little smile on my face. “Madam, I’m Adam,” I said as I shook his hand. “A palindromic visitor.”

The dogs were now on their feet and had their dark almond-shaped eyes fixed on me. People who don’t train dogs often say, “Don’t your dogs love you! They watch you all the time.” My dogs certainly do love me, but the adoring gaze that always returns to my face is a carefully trained behavior.

“The girl with the red hair told me to wait inside,” the man said. “Out of the rain.”

Leah. Who else? Who else would’ve given free run of my house to a strange man who’d arrived here on a motorcycle in the rain but who couldn’t be expected to wait outdoors?

“She left,” he added. Rising to his feet, he said, “You have something for me.”

My principal employer,
Dog’s Life
magazine, does not send couriers to pick up my columns. Still, if I had anything whatever for anyone at all, it was bound to be something or other about…

“Something about dogs?” I asked. “About malamutes?”

“You haven’t heard from Calvin?”

The Calvin I knew well was a miniature schnauzer. “There must be some misunderstanding,” I said.

“Holly Winter,” he said.

The dogs sensed my relief even before I let my breath out. “You’re looking for the
other
Holly Winter,” I said. “She lives in Cambridge, too. We’ve had mix-ups before. That’s what this is about. You’ve got the wrong one.”

As if I’d released them from an obedience exercise, Rowdy and Kimi stirred a little. Rowdy meandered to the big water bowl and drank. Just as casually, Kimi moved her eyes from my face to the back door. I often had the uncanny sense that she could read my mind, but at the moment, I was practically reading hers. Domestic dogs, having evolved with us, are hardwired to follow the human gaze: they look where we’re looking, and they check out objects of our attention. As if acting on my desire to show Adam the door, Kimi took a few steps toward it. I nearly laughed.

“I’ll give you her address,” I said. Internet addict that I am, I usually use Web directories, but there was an old phone book in a cabinet under the counter. I pulled it out, looked up the other Holly Winter, scribbled her address on a notepad, and handed Adam the slip of paper. “It’s off Kirkland Street, a left turn off Kirkland. When you leave my driveway, turn right. You have to. It’s one-way. And then turn right onto Concord Avenue. Follow it almost to Harvard Square. Just before the Square, you’ll see the Cambridge Common on your left. After the Common, go left. Get in the middle lane and take the underpass. When you come out of the underpass, turn left and then turn right on Kirkland Street. Then watch the signs. It’s a left turn.”

Like Kimi, I stepped toward the door. Although Adam had done nothing that felt at all threatening, I wanted him out of the house, in part so that I could call Leah and let her know exactly what I thought of her rotten judgment.

Adam thanked me. I opened the door. As he was leaving, he paused briefly. “What kind of dogs are these?”

“Alaskan malamutes,” I said.

“They’re beautiful.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And that’s some motorcycle you have.”

He smiled.

“It’s a Harley,” I said. “I know that. But—”

“It’s a Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glide.”

And that’s how I found out what it was.

Only later did I realize that whereas I’d observed the Harley closely and learned its name, I’d been so startled to discover its rider in my kitchen and so angry at Leah for having let him in and having left him alone in my house that I’d learned almost nothing about him. Him. The Harley rider. The young Moses. The man looking for Holly Winter. Adam. I knew that he drove a Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glide with a Maine plate. And I didn’t even know his last name.

Adam: precisely what I didn’t know him from.