Dandy Detects (2 page)

"Oh, dear," she said. "They are getting tied
up!" She looked up and saw that the other woman was awkwardly
trying to control her dog with her right hand, while she used her
left to hold the half veil of her hat down over the left side of
her face.

I wonder what she is trying to hide?
Barbara’s heart squeezed painfully as she remembered her own
fearful attempts to hide the cuts and bruises that bloomed
periodically on her face after her husband's rages. Not wanting the
woman to catch her staring, Barbara again looked down at the dogs
at her feet and said, "What a splendid dog you have. What kind is
he?"

"He is a Scottish terrier," a soft voice
replied. "I call him Gordie. He seems to like your dog. What breed
is he?"

"I think he is some sort of mixture. Jamie,
that's my son, found him on the street being tormented by some
boys. We call him Dandy. There, I think we have them untangled,"
Barbara added.

The other woman pulled her dog to her side,
letting her full skirts separate the dogs. She then nodded politely
and began to move past Barbara.

"Please, Mrs. Francis, before you go. You
must think me daft. But I particularly wanted to meet you because I
wondered if you ever gave piano lessons. I would like my son, he is
eight, to learn. I wouldn't be able to pay much, but...."

"Oh my, no," the woman said. "I don't think
that would be possible. My husband wouldn't let….I mean a small boy
in the house…I don't think he...."

Barbara broke into the woman's protestations,
"You have misunderstood me. I live at Mrs. Fuller's boarding house
on O'Farrell, and she has an upright in the parlor that she lets
the boarders use. I thought you might be able to teach him
there."

Seeing that the woman was shaking her head
and uttering more disjointed phrases, Barbara continued, "Please,
just think about it. Now I must let you go on your way. It was a
pleasure to meet you."

As she moved past, she thought she heard Mrs.
Francis reply faintly, "So kind of you.”
Perhaps she is just
shy,
Barbara thought as she moved on.
I could stop by and
visit her next week, bring Jamie with me, nobody withstands his
charm.

Barbara sat bolt upright in her bed, drenched
in sweat. Her heart pounded, the remnants of a dream swiftly
evaporating. She had been back in Kansas, lost in the cornfields,
and she had shouted. No, someone else had shouted. As her eyes
began to focus, she realized Dandy was standing on the bed beside
her, staring intently towards the window, whose curtain she had
left open in the weak hope that this would permit the ferocious
heat of the room to escape.

"Did you hear something, Dandy?" she
whispered. When she spoke, he looked back at her briefly and then
turned again, leaning forward, his neck stretched out, sharp ears
cocked. Without warning he began to growl, while backing up, never
turning his head from the window. Barbara snatched the dog to her
chest, trying to soothe him. She feared he would wake Jamie or,
worse yet, Miss Minnie and Miss Millie across the hall. Then she
noticed Dandy was trembling violently, and she could feel his heart
beating wildly under her hands.

"What is it, boy? Let's go see, is there a
prowler out there? Do we need to sound the alarm?" Barbara
disengaged herself from the bedclothes and got up, all the while
stroking the agitated dog. She crossed to the desk in front of the
window, which was again piled high with essays to grade. Looking
outside, she noticed that despite the late hour there was a light
on across the way.
I bet I am not the only person who is finding
it hard to sleep in this heat,
she thought. Then she saw a man,
she assumed it was Mr. Francis, move into view, his back to the
window. He was shirtless, his suspenders over bare skin, and he
seemed to be staring at his feet. Dandy struggled in her arms and
began to bark. The man swung around to peer out the window, and
Barbara scuttled backwards, her heart again pounding, Dandy now
silent in her arms.

Surely he couldn't see me, I'm standing in
the dark. He just heard Dandy
, she thought. Nevertheless, when
she crept back to the window she approached from the side and
peeked out again. The light had gone out, and the texture of the
square of darkness at the window suggested that the man had pulled
the curtains as well. She stared out for a moment, seeing nothing
else stirring in the still night air.

"Mother, what's wrong?" Jamie called.

"Nothing, dear. Dandy just heard something,
but everything is fine. Probably some cat," she said, hoping this
was true. She felt Dandy's hot breath on her cheek, but he was no
longer trembling, so she set him down and heard the sharp click,
click, click of his toenails as he made his way across to Jamie's
bed. As she climbed back into her own bed, she heard the soft
murmurs of her son talking to his dog, and she smiled and
unexpectedly went to sleep.

"
Mother, I told you, he isn't a
mongrel. Georgie's Uncle Sean said he saw a dog just like Dandy
back east, and he was a special new kind of dog. Part English
bulldog, part English terrier, and part French bull dog." Jamie
trotted in front of her, holding Dandy's leash.

Barbara replied, "Well, Jamie, if that isn't
a mongrel I don't know what is. Be careful, don't let him! Oh dear,
too late." Dandy, who had been weaving back and forth, his minute
black nose snuffling up smells from the wooden planks of the
sidewalk, had suddenly swerved right and lifted his leg on a barrel
of shoes outside a cobbler’s. At least the dark stain on the barrel
attested to Dandy not being the first dog to anoint it.
But
really, did he have to lift his leg every few feet?

"
Mother, I'm telling you, they gave
this mixture a name! That makes it a pure breed. Least that's what
Georgie's Uncle Sean says, and he's an expert on dogs, Georgie
says. His Uncle Sean says that they call dogs like Dandy Boston
terriers cause they were made in Boston. But seems to me if Dandy
was born in San Francisco, he should be called a San Francisco
terrier, don't you think?"

"Well, if you ask me, since he is of English
and French heritage, but made in America, I think that they should
call them American terriers. But it doesn't matter what he is,
Dandy's a fine dog." Barbara smiled at her son. Whatever kind of
dog Dandy was, he was a blessing. They had had to move so often in
the first four years after they left Kansas that Jamie had become
quiet and withdrawn. Moving last year to San Francisco was even
harder on him. San Francisco was such a big city. The papers said
when the 1880 census was taken next year the city might turn out to
have as many as 400,000 people! So much noise and bustle, Jamie had
seemed afraid to go outside. Moving to Mrs. Fuller's boarding house
last January had helped, everyone was so nice to him. But in the
last month since he had rescued Dandy, he had become a new boy. He
was making friends, and he had begun to roam the neighborhood on
his walks with his dog. She was so relieved, and she felt as long
as he had Dandy with him, he would be all right.

"Jamie, wait, let that wagon get past before
we cross Taylor." Barbara moved to the end of the wooden sidewalk
to stand by her son, watching to make sure he had a tight grip on
Dandy's leash. It was early Saturday morning, a week since she had
run into Mrs. Francis, and they were on their way to visit the
resale shop, hoping to find her alone.

"Now I know you aren't very excited about
having piano lessons, but I want you to give it a try," Barbara
said a few moments later as the approached the resale shop. The
windows fronting the sidewalk were jammed with hammers, boxes of
nails, iron files, several shovels tied together like some gigantic
bouquet, and a saw that looked large enough to fell a redwood. Then
she noticed that the shade on the front door was pulled down, and a
“closed” sign hung against the shade.

Before she had fully digested this obstacle
to her plan, her son, who tugged at her sleeve, distracted her.

"Look at Dandy, mother. What's the matter
with him?"

Barbara looked down and saw that Dandy was
standing stock still in front of the iron gate across the entryway
to the side of the store, stretched out as long as possible from
his pathetically small nose to his equally diminutive crooked tail,
and his right front paw was drawn up under his belly. He looked for
all the world like some miniature hunter, at point.

"Well, dear, he seems to have found some
particularly intriguing scent, " she said, trying not to laugh.
Then Dandy, growling, began to move, stiff-legged, towards the
gate, and as Barbara came up behind him she was startled to see the
fur at the back of his neck standing up. Her son had knelt beside
the dog, looking through the gate and down the side of the house,
and he said, "There, there, boy. What do you see? Is there another
dog down there?"

Barbara, fully expecting to see Mrs. Francis'
Scottie, peered down the narrow passageway, but she saw nothing but
an empty brick walkway. Dandy then sat down abruptly and began to
howl.

"Positively howled! I don't know how to
describe it, a kind of eerie yodel. It was the most bone-chilling
sound," Barbara said to the three women sitting with her in the
kitchen later that evening. Mrs. O'Rourke, the cook, Kathleen, the
servant, and Mrs. Fuller, the boarding house owner, all looked at
the dog in question, who was lying down, his small muzzle between
his front paws, his brown eyes looking up at them.

Barbara felt like an interloper in the
basement kitchen. Yet she was desperate for advice, and this was
the only place she could think to turn. She didn't know why she
felt so uncomfortable. Jamie, of course, could be found down here
almost every day, doing his homework or playing with Dandy, who
stayed in the kitchen when Jamie was at school and Barbara was at
work. And she knew that Mrs. Stein often spent the evening down
here when her husband was away on business. It wasn't that she felt
she was above Mrs. O'Rourke or Kathleen, either. Mrs. O'Rourke had
been so good to Jamie; she felt nothing but gratitude towards her.
And Kathleen! Well, she just wished the young girls in her English
and literature classes had half the intelligence and lively
curiosity of Kathleen, who was probably not much older than those
students. Maybe it was the third woman sitting across from her in
the kitchen rocking chair, Mrs. Annie Fuller, who made her feel so
uneasy.

Mrs. Fuller was a young widow, in her
mid-twenties, who had inherited the house on O'Farrell Street and
last year had turned it into a boarding house, although Mrs.
O'Rourke was in charge of the day-to-day running of the household.
She was a slender, graceful woman, with reddish blonde hair and
deep brown eyes--eyes that were now looking at Barbara with
disconcerting directness.
She sees too much, that's what makes
me uncomfortable,
Barbara thought to herself.
Everyone else
just sees me as Mrs. Hewitt, the schoolteacher and doting mother of
Jamie. She looks like she can see into my very soul. She couldn't
possibly be really clairvoyant, could she?

Barbara tore her eyes away and looked back
down at Dandy. As "Madam Sibyl," Mrs. Fuller spent most of her days
reading palms and charting stars in order to advise a number of
proper middle-aged women and prosperous businessmen. Mrs. Fuller
had explained to Barbara, when she had interviewed her about
becoming one of her boarders, that she billed herself as a
clairvoyant because this was the only way she could get paid for
the domestic and business advice she gave. She had assured Barbara
that her clientele was very select and that there would be no
reason for her to worry about the effect living in the same house
as Madam Sibyl would have on her son, or her own reputation. At the
time, Barbara had been so eager to move out of the wretched rented
room she and Jamie had been living in that she had paid little
attention to these assurances. But Mrs. Fuller had been true to her
word. In fact, she was so discreet that Barbara had only once
gotten a glimpse of her dressed in the odd clothing and wig that
made up her alter ego, and Jamie seemed oblivious to the fact that
the Madam Sibyl who worked in the front parlor of the house and the
"nice Mrs. Fuller" were one and the same.

Of all the women in the boarding house, Mrs.
Fuller was closest to her in age and education. They both had been
married, but were now without their husbands, and it would have
been natural for the two of them to become close. Nevertheless,
Barbara had been relieved that Mrs. Fuller seldom ate with her
boarders and that there hadn't been many opportunities to get to
know her better.
Until now. Why do I have such difficulty making
friends? Surely none of these women would ever deliberately hurt
me,
she thought.

"Mrs. Hewitt, dogs do howl. Why has this
upset you so?" Mrs. Fuller's crisp clear voice interrupted
Barbara's thoughts. "Was there a particular reason you needed to
see Mrs. Francis today about the piano lessons?"

"Oh, no. Not really," Barbara replied. "But,
afterwards I began to worry about Gordie, Mrs. Francis' little
black Scottie. You know, from my window I can look down and see
into their back yard. On the days I'm not working I always see
Gordie, digging in the back or sitting in the shade of a bush by
the back door. And every evening, about when the sun sets, I hear
Mrs. Francis call for him to come into the house. But I haven't
heard her, or seen the dog, in a few days."

"Perhaps Mrs. Francis is away," Mrs. Fuller
said.

"Yes, yes." said Barbara. "That is what her
husband told me, but I don't know...."

Kathleen interrupted, "Did you speak to the
lady's husband then? A handsome man, but ill-mannered from what I
have heard."