Bloodlines (23 page)

“Afton’s somewhere near Westbrook? West?”

“Northwest. Not too far.”

“And the Simmses?”

“Well, from what I can put together, both of the parents drank.” I could hear the creak of a wicker chair as Mrs. Appleyard prepared to settle in for a long story. “But things didn’t go completely to pieces until the mother died. Walter would have been seventeen or so. Cheryl’s about two years his junior. And then, let’s say approximately two years ago, the father took off. The family had had, oh, I suppose they called it a farm, but that’s a glorified term for it. And then, at some point, before the mother died, they got talked into one of these broiler businesses. A chicken farm. Some charlatan sold
Simms on a get-rich-quick scheme, got him to erect one of these ghastly tin chicken-ranch affairs. Hideous thing. Absolutely enormous. What’s left of it is still there. Well,
that
little enterprise didn’t last very long.”

“Is that where the dogs are? In this, uh, chicken coop?”

“A few of them, I assume, on the first floor. I can’t imagine that there’s anything upstairs. Most of the roof’s gone. I never got close enough to get a look. Cheryl stood right there on the porch of the house with a shotgun in her hand and ordered me off the property.”

“My God,” I said. “When was this?”

“Two or three months ago. Three. The beginning of December, I believe it was. It seems that everyone in Afton knew what was going on, but it’s a dreadful little place, really, appalling schools and a tremendous sense that a man’s home is his castle, what one’s neighbor does to his dogs and his children is strictly his own business and all that sort of rot.”

“So people know, but—”

“Well, the primary concern is for Cheryl,” Mrs. Appleyard said crisply. “And the authorities
are
aware of her, and I don’t know how many social service agencies have tried to get involved and do something. That’s how I happen to be familiar with the situation, because one of the social workers
finally
had the good sense to get in touch with us about the dogs. But now, well, it seems that concern lessened somewhat after the father was out of the picture. There’d been some suspicions about
just
what was going on there when he was around.”

“Abuse of some kind?”

“Neglect, at best,” said Mrs. Appleyard. “What else doesn’t bear contemplation. But then the father packed up his bags and took off, and it was about the same time that Cheryl finished school. So, after that, there was a bit of out-of-sight-out-of-mind operating, and, besides, the father was the focus of the most extreme concern, and that little problem seemed to have
cleared itself up nicely. And this Walter, the brother, is obviously a bad hat, but he seems prepared to provide for her, at least in the minimal sense that she’s getting enough to eat and has a roof of some sort over her head. I wish the same could be said for the dogs.”

“Has anyone filed any complaints? Has there been any kind of legal—”

Before I could finish, Mrs. Appleyard huffed indignantly. “In brief, we are in a perfect pickle! You can smell the place from the road, and I’ve heard I don’t know how many secondhand stories about the numbers of dogs there, but I cannot get a firsthand complaint, and it’s impossible to show probable cause because we cannot get onto the property! I am certainly not setting foot there again, not all alone, I promise you.”

“But at least people are aware of it now,” I said. “I guess that’s a start. I’m concerned because they seem to have malamutes, or Walter does. I got involved because of a rescue dog that originally came from a pet shop. Puppy Luv. I saw the papers. Simms was the breeder. At first, I assumed he must be in Missouri or somewhere, some obvious place like that.”

“The whole puppy mill industry is undergoing an adaptive metamorphosis, if you will,” said Mrs. Appleyard. “Negative publicity about out-of-state puppies? Then adapt! Raise them locally, under precisely the same conditions, of course. Vermont has a terrible problem now. And New Hampshire. But the pet shops are still bringing in puppies from out of state, of course. And I wish we could assume that the puppy mills are the only source, but there have always been rumors about breeders who sell to these pet shops. They aren’t supposed to, and they hope no one finds out, but it’s been known to happen.”

“You know,” I said reluctantly, “I’ve heard those rumors, but I honestly find that hard to believe, except in really rare cases.”

“Oh, admittedly, it’s rare, but there are rumors now and again. I heard it just the other day, as a matter
of fact, about one of your malamute breeders. This is someone I won’t stoop to name, because I won’t stoop to gossip, but this is a very well-known local breeder, a reputable breeder, except that what people have been saying for a while is that she breeds too many litters, from what one hears.”

“People are always saying that,” I pointed out. “Breeders always think that other people are overbreeding. But they’re not doing it themselves, naturally. What
they’re
doing is making an important contribution to improving the breed.” Mrs. Appleyard actually guffawed. She does that. I went on. “But, um, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but if the person you heard this about is Lois Metzler, it’s a misunderstanding.” It wasn’t a wild guess. There aren’t all that many well-known local malamute breeders; Lois Metzler bred at least twice as many puppies as any of the others; and everyone was, in fact, always saying that she bred way too many litters.

“A name never passed my lips,” said Mrs. Appleyard.

“Lois Metzler breeds a lot more dogs than I think she should or you think she should, but I’m positive that she would never sell to a pet shop. Never. So if you hear that rumor again …”

“I’ll let it go in one ear and out the other,” Mrs. Appleyard said, thus, to my mind at least, confirming my guess that Lois Metzler had actually been the breeder in question. Then she changed the subject. “I heard that one of those animal rights lunatics released one of your dogs,” she said.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I happened to … actually, don’t mention it to people, but I ended up meeting her. We had a long talk. We worked things out. She didn’t really understand what she was doing.”

“A dog loose indoors at a show! This was your male?”

“Yes. But nothing happened.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Holly, you’re taking
it much too lightly. Think of the consequences! If he’d gotten himself in a fight?”

“This person, the young woman who did it, is … I felt so sorry for her, and she really won’t ever do it again. She’s very young and sort of lost. She was basically led astray by bad companions. She really was.”

“And what makes you assume that her companions have suddenly changed?”

“Well, for a start, I guess because I’ve become one of them.”

“These animal rights people are dangerous,” Mrs. Appleyard boomed. “They’re convinced that the end justifies the means. They’ll say whatever they think is convenient at the moment, but when it comes down to what they do, they’ll stop at nothing. Absolutely nothing. Don’t trust that young woman, Holly! Don’t trust her!”

A quick trip to the phone book shelves of the Cambridge Public Library gave me Walter Simms’s address—or what there was to it: Old County Lane, Afton. Back home again, I set to work preparing to present myself to the Simmses as a purveyor of a line of flea control products. By now I’d had enough of masquerading as a puppy buyer, and I wasn’t sure that Simms and his sister did direct sales, anyway. The role of social worker or humane society representative would have been plausible, of course, but my good bullet-proof vest was at the cleaner’s, and the spare isn’t fit to wear in public. The sales rep of a dog chow company would have been worth a try, I guess, but I picked flea control products because I wanted something that would assuredly be of no great interest to a puppy mill operator. On second thought, maybe dog food would have done as well.

A battered storage cabinet in the basement yielded two pump spray bottles of flea and tick killer, a canister of powder, a bottle of insecticidal shampoo, another of kennel and yard spray, and two unopened packages containing flea and tick collars, virtually the full line of a company called Flee-B-Gon that may well have Flee-B-Gon out of business by now. Its products are—or were—perfectly natural, organic, gentle, and useless, as I’d
discovered the previous August when every flea in Cambridge seemed to have landed on my two dogs. Steve had warned me that vitamin E and coconut oil would be ineffective against the megainfestation, but he’d also assured me that they were harmless. If Walter or Cheryl Simms took me up on the offer of a free sample—assuming I got that far—at least the dogs wouldn’t end up in worse shape than they already were.

Back upstairs, I ran a damp sponge over the Flee-B-Gon containers, and when they looked practically new, I packed them neatly into a briefcase that ordinarily held nothing except loathsome memories of a job I once held in a place suffering from what I believe is called “sick-building syndrome,” which is to say that no dogs were allowed.

I didn’t bother changing into anything special. I wasn’t sure what a Flee-B-Gon rep looked like, and I was willing to bet that Walter and Cheryl Simms weren’t experts on pest-control couture, either. Besides, the thermometer outside my kitchen window read forty-one, and what should have been falling as snow was pelting down as premature spring rain. I wore a yellow slicker and a pair of the world’s only genuinely waterproof boots, my yellow L.L. Bean Wellingtons. Getting your first puppy? You can manage without the canine playpen, the X-pen, and the Wee-Wee Pads. It’s even possible to raise a dog without a crate. But unless you live in the Sahara, you’re going to walk the pup rain or shine, so invest in L.L. Bean Wellies, the best two-footed friend a dog walker ever had.

According to the atlas, Afton was beyond Route 495, Boston’s outer beltway, farther from Cambridge than I’d thought. Rowdy and Kimi would be bored at home, and I’d miss their company, but their health was more important than my comfort. If by chance I got into the puppy mill, I’d leave with my boots and maybe my hands and my slicker contaminated by the multitude of the parasites and diseases that flourish in filth. Infection is a problem among the largely pampered entrants in a
dog show. Some kennels maintain isolation areas where dogs live in quarantine after they return from shows. To avoid carrying diseases into their own kennels, a few extraordinarily careful people reserve one pair of shoes exclusively for shows. I don’t own show shoes that never touch home ground, but I always keep Rowdy and Kimi up on their shots, I have regular checks for parasites, and I don’t expose them to puppy mills. The shoes I’d worn at Bill Coakley’s and at Your Local Breeder had already been soaked in chlorine bleach.

I spread the dogs’ fake-sheepskin pallets on the kitchen floor, tuned the radio to a talk station, hugged the dogs, told them to be good, and set out. Then I headed out of Cambridge on Route 2. I eventually cut west and drove through the bleak, sodden landscape for what felt like hours.

My mental image of the fat-bellied Walter Simms had given way to the reality of the lean guy at Rinehart’s, but I’d somehow retained my original vision of his sprawling midwestern farm. Old County Lane turned out to be a narrow but paved rural track overhung with New England maples. When I pulled the Bronco to the side of the road in front of the Simmses’ place, I realized that although I’d discarded the pig-faced slob, I’d unconsciously located my revised Simms on the original’s turf. But the faded, sloppy white letters painted on the dented black mailbox by the gate definitely spelled out “Simms.” The name matched. The place didn’t. I’d been picturing exactly what I’d seen in the films and photos of puppy mills in Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa, places like that. Kansas? No. I haven’t seen many pictures from there, certainly no recent ones, and for good reason: In Kansas, it’s a felony to photograph a puppy mill. If it weren’t for the First Amendment, Kansas would probably declare it a felony to make word pictures, too. Anyway, thick New England underbrush and February-bare maples encroached on Walter and Cheryl Simms’s little lot. When Mrs. Appleyard had said that you could smell the place from the
road, I’d imagined a quarter-mile drive across flat fields to a big farmhouse and a collection of widely scattered dairy barns and substantial outbuildings. The Simmses’ seedy little two-story dirty-white house sat at the end of about ten car lengths of rutted mud. The only large structure on the place, a long barrackslike sheet metal chicken coop in back of the house, had half collapsed from an original two floors to a single story. The side yard held an avocado green refrigerator with the doors still on, the wrecks of two wheelless cars, some little plywood shacks, several oil drums, and a flashy-looking late-model car that I was instantly able to identify as a Mustang, a Camaro, or possibly what I thought might be called a Trans Am. In any case, its color was black, and it was trimmed with red and white racing stripes.

Probably because I’d watched films of raids on puppy mills, I’d imagined driving into a farmyard, but, at the Simmses’, a rusted barbed wire and wood gate blocked the entrance. Cheryl and Walter’s landscape designer had cleverly repeated the texture and materials of the gate in the treatment of the fence that separated the property from the verge of the road. It, too, was constructed of sagging, aged uprights and cross pieces, and its chicken wire harmoniously echoed the reddish-brown of the barbed gate’s hydrated ferric oxide. A big store-bought black-and-orange sign nailed to the dead center of the gate announced: