Play Dead (3 page)

“We walked here,” Beth said. “I live about
a mile east on Pine Street.”

A residence on that part of Pine meant lots of traffic
and a small yard,
I thought. Problematic for a large dog. I reached into
the bottom drawer of my desk and grabbed a premium-quality dog biscuit, which I
brought over to Sage. Strangely, Sage sniffed at it but jerked away as if
afraid he’d get an electrical shock. “He’s been drinking plenty of water?” I
asked.

“Yeah,” Beth answered, her voice rife with
concern, “but he won’t go near his food.”

“What about table scraps? Will he eat
those?”

“Isn’t it bad to feed a dog table scraps?
I’ve always been told that.”

The ever-present list of “thou musts” and “thou
must nots,”
I thought. If
I were Sage’s adopted owner, I’d feed him filet mignon straight off the plate,
if that were my only means to keep him from starvation. I suspected that if
more owners trusted their own instincts instead of seeking expert advice, their
dogs would do just fine. However, since I was one of those “experts,” this was
an opinion I kept to myself.

“Mixing table scraps into a dog’s dry food
is not necessarily wrong. I sometimes do that with my own dogs. At this point,
we need to know whether or not Sage will eat
anything.
We need to ensure
he doesn’t starve while we’re still trying to identify the cause of his
problem.”

Beth shrugged, her hands buried in
her pants pockets, and chewed on her lower lip. “I’m a vegetarian, so it never
occurred to me to try to give him some of my food.”

I tried what was perhaps the oldest and most obvious trick
in the book. I broke the biscuit in half and pretended to eat my half, palming
it, then offering it again to Sage. To my mild surprise, he chomped both halves
of the biscuit down with a ravenous hunger.

“Wow!” Beth exclaimed. “How did you get
him to do that?”

I grabbed the box of biscuits and selected
a second biscuit, letting Sage watch my every motion. I held it out for him. He
rose and sniffed the dog bone carefully, keeping an eye on me, trembling in his
widespread stance as if set to bolt if I made a move. He gobbled it down. I
offered him a third, and this he ate without hesitation.

“I’ve tried the dog biscuits he’s used to,
but he wouldn’t take them from me at all.” Beth sighed. “Maybe Sage just doesn’t
like me. Or doesn’t trust me to feed him.”

“I doubt that’s the problem. You offer him
one.” I gave Beth the box of dog biscuits. Beth coaxed in a babyish voice, holding
out a biscuit. Sage panted, watching her, and then glanced at me. He wouldn’t
take the biscuit. “Act as though you’re eating it.” She did, and Sage
immediately gobbled the treat in her palm.

Sage’s eating problem seemed to be related
to his actual dog food, so I explained that I needed to make a house call.
First, we discussed fees and the possible length of treatment. Then I got Beth’s
address and said I’d meet them there once I returned some phone calls.

My heart lurched as the collie hesitated
before following Beth, instead looking up at me and lifting a paw. “Good dog,
Sage,” I said.

The collie turned to follow his owner out
the door with all the resignation of an animal that knows he is about to be
beaten.

With renewed determination to help Sage as
quickly and completely as possible, I replayed my first message and dialed the
number. The woman’s voice that answered was the same as the one on my recorder.
I identified myself and said, “I understand you have a fox terrier who’s
snapping at your children?”

“Oh, yes. Let me get my husband. He asked
me to call, but it’s really his dog.”

That struck me as a bit odd; in my
experience, most women claimed ownership of all matters regarding their
children. The woman dropped the phone with a thud and called, “John!” at the
top of her lungs. In the background, I could hear what sounded like young
children laughing and a high-pitched yap of a dog.

“Allida Babcock?” a deep voice finally
asked on the other end of the phone.

“Yes.” I looked at my notes where I’d jotted
the name Sarah Adams and said, “Is this John Adams?”

“O’Farrell, actually. John O’Farrell.
Adams is my wife’s maiden name. I listened to your show, so I can tell you
right off the bat that, yes, I’ve taken Mugsy to a vet, and he told me my dog
badly needed some obedience training.”

“Has he actually bitten one of your
children?”

“She. Yes, she’s nipped at both my five
and my seven year olds’ ankles, but never hard enough to really hurt them. The
bites didn’t even break the skin, or—” He paused, and I could hear angry
murmurs of his wife’s voice. “Just the top layer of skin got a little
scratched. It healed in no time.” Again, there were angry murmurs in the
background. He said into the phone, “We’re on our way out.”

“Can we set something up now? Maybe have
you come to my house to do an observation?”

“Sure, that would be—”

“How ‘bout tomorrow? I know it’s a
Saturday and everything, but weekends would really be best for me. That way we
can all be here. I could pay double your going rates for a house call, since
you’d have to give up part of your weekend.”

“I suppose tomorrow would be all right,” I
said, trying to sound slightly downhearted at the concept of “having” to work
the next day. At this stage of my career, I would drive to Wyoming on the
Fourth of July if that meant establishing a client base. “I don’t charge extra
for weekend visits.” I took down the address and set an appointment for ten
a.m.

The next call—whose golden retriever
was chewing up house and home—also had a schedule that he thought was
best observed during the weekend. I set up my visit to his house for late
Saturday afternoon, then made the short drive to Beth’s and pulled into a space
by the curb.

Beth was watching out the front window and
opened the door for me before I could knock. “Sage is in the kitchen,” she
murmured. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her nose pink, as if she’d recently been
crying. “I tried that trick you taught me... pretending to eat the dog food and
offering it to him. He all but ran away from me.”

I placed a reassuring hand on Beth’s
forearm. “Let me see what I can do.”

Beth took a halting breath and said, “You’ve
got to do something to help me. I just don’t know how much longer he can last.”

I tried to project confidence as I nodded
at Beth’s words, but I had no idea why Sage would starve himself here, yet eat
dog biscuits in my office. If there was one thing I knew for certain from my
three decades of being in the company of dogs, it was that neither I nor anyone
else could ever truly know what was going on in a dog’s mind.

Sage was lying on his side in front of the
refrigerator. Despite his lethargy, which was no doubt a result of his
starvation and the walk to and from my office, Sage’s tail thumped on the grimy
maroon linoleum when I entered the small, dark, and messy kitchen. I petted
him, feeling heartsick at his skeletal body.

“Can I see his feeding supplies, please?”

Beth pulled out a nearly full forty-pound
bag from beside the refrigerator. It was the same top-of-the-line brand that I
fed my German shepherd. I grabbed a handful of the dry dog food, then dropped
it back into the bag. My palm felt strangely sticky afterwards.

“This is the food you got from the animal
shelter?” I asked.

“Uh huh. Hannah’s neighbor, Dennis, was
taking care of Sage for a couple of weeks after Hannah died. He donated his
food and dog treats to the shelter.”

Underneath the window by the heater was a
large red dog bowl, with the name
sage
in
white letters. I grabbed a kibble from the bowl and squeezed it between my
fingertip and thumb. I sniffed it. It smelled perfectly normal. The kibble had
such a tacky surface it stuck to my index finger, and I had to shake it off to
drop it back into its bowl.

I touched my fingertip to my tongue. An
acrid taste filled my mouth. “Can I see the dog biscuits, too, please?”

“Sure.” Beth held out the box. “Why? Is
there something wrong with the food?”

I grabbed a bone-shaped biscuit and
scraped its surface with a fingernail. I touched that fingertip to my tongue.
Again the taste was so bitter my lips nearly puckered.

“The dog food’s been tainted.”

Beth’s face paled. “You mean, someone
poisoned it?”

“Not exactly. It’s been treated with
something, probably an odorless dog repellent, such as Bitter Apple. It’s not
poisonous, but it makes the food taste repulsive to dogs.”

Beth Gleason’s jaw dropped. “What do you
mean? How could that be? I don’t—”

“Could anyone have doctored Sage’s dog
food after you got it?”

Beth began to pace in tight circles,
combing her fingers through her hair. At length, she shook her head. “No, that
isn’t possible. Somebody had to have done this to the food before I got it. Oh,
God. This makes me so sick! Here I’ve been trying to get Sage to trust me, and
I’ve been offering him only inedible food!” She punched her thigh. “Why didn’t
I think of that? But, how could I have known? I mean, it’s so...weird.”

Beth sat down on the floor beside Sage and
lifted his head onto her lap. She said under her breath, “I could kill whoever
did this!”

Why would anyone want to hurt Sage? Was it
possible somebody wanted him dead because of what he’d witnessed? Surely not.
Even assuming, despite the suicide ruling, that Hannah Jones was murdered, Sage
could do nothing more threatening than to bark at the killer.

The dog might have been used as a guinea
pig in some food aversion experiment or training exercise by his former owner.
Could Hannah Jones have been that cruel?

“The good news,” I said, “is with some new
food, we can restore Sage’s strength and spirit very soon. Though he’ll have to
be retrained to know that he can eat kibble and dog biscuits again. I need to
try to find out why and when this happened. That will help me determine my
course of treatment.”

“That’s what I’d like to know, too,” Beth
said, gently scooting out from under Sage’s head. She hopped to her feet and
started rifling through a layer of papers spread across the off-white and gray
speckled Formica top of her kitchen table.

“What are you looking for?”

“I can’t believe Hannah would have done this
to her dog. It had to be...the people who were taking care of him in between
her and me. I’ve got Dennis’s number here someplace. That’s his name. Dennis
Corning.”

“Why don’t you think Hannah Jones was
responsible?”

Beth paused from her search to meet my
eyes. “She loved Sage like he was her kid or something. She used to bring him
to class and everything.”

“Class?”

Beth nodded, returning to her search. “I
took vegetarian cooking lessons from her. That’s where I first met Sage and
decided I wanted to get a dog just like him.” She grabbed a small strip of
paper that looked as if it had been torn off the bottom of a sheet of yellow
notepaper. “Here.” She handed me the slip of paper, which contained only the
name Dennis Corning followed by a phone number, then she whirled on a heel and
headed toward the refrigerator.

“I just realized. I got a new thing of
tofu in the fridge.” She began rifling through her refrigerator and said over
her shoulder, “Can I see if Sage’ll eat that?”

“Uh, sure,” I answered, wondering what
feeding a half-starved dog tofu would do to his digestive system. “Just give
him a small portion, though. His stomach has to be extremely sensitive at this
point. It isn’t used to having any food in it.” Let alone tofu. Beth slid the
white, rectangular block of tofu out of its plastic container. It landed with a
wet-sounding
shwock
on the gray Formica countertop. She sliced off an
inch, which she offered to Sage on her palm. He gobbled it up. Watching him, I
could only think how ironic this scene was in a town sometimes referred to as
the tofu-eating capital of the world. Boulder, Colorado, where even the dogs
eat bean curd.

“Don’t give him any more,” I said. This
angelic dog had already been conditioned to think dog food was bad. This was
going to further program him to think only tofu was good. I glanced at my
watch. I had plenty of time left on Beth’s hour, and I needed to make sure Sage
got a decent meal as soon as possible. “Let’s go to PetsMart and get him some
dog food. The key is going to be to give him small, frequent feedings and to
gradually nurse him back to his full weight.”

Beth returned the tofu to the
refrigerator, then dried her palms on her black pant legs.
Not exactly
Martha Stewart,
I thought, averting my gaze.

“Should we just take your car?” she asked.

“Sure. I want you to purchase a small bag
of both Sage’s brand and a second brand. We’ll mix the two together, so that
you won’t cause too much upset to his digestive system by switching brands, yet
the food will smell different so he won’t associate it with the Bitter Apple.
But before we go, I think you should call your vet and explain Sage’s
situation. I’ve never worked with a dog this undernourished before. Your vet
undoubtedly has.”