Ruff Way to Go (12 page)

As I
pondered the matter, I realized that there was simply no way for me to control
Luellen’s actions with Shogun. I could, at least, take comfort in knowing that
the sweet little dog was safe and being well cared for. The same couldn’t
necessarily be said for Suds and her litter, however. An animal shelter was a good
temporary home for a stray—better and safer than the streets—but it
wasn’t any place to house a nursing dog and her five puppies.

Before I
could dismiss the notion that the husky and her puppies were suffering, I had
to see her. Perhaps another foster home had been located. If not, I could think
about taking them in myself.

The thought
of Suds and her litter brought Melanie to mind. I wondered how she, at her
young age, was handling such an immense, monstrous thing as the violent death
of her mother. I barely knew Melanie and didn’t know how to go about reaching
out to her. Maybe I could at least talk to her father about the possibility of
their adopting one of the puppies.

The animal
shelter was in Loveland, due north of Berthoud and a short drive from Campion.
Loveland is a nice little town, several times the size of Berthoud, though that’s
not saying much. Its biggest claim to fame is that, before Valentine’s Day,
people all over the country route their cards through the city to get their “Loveland”
postmark on the envelopes.

The shelter
was privately funded and operated out of a converted house. I pulled into the
parking lot and walked toward the single-story brick building. The warm breeze
carried the distinct odor of manure from the cattle feedlots that surrounded
this part of the county. The stuffy air within the shelter smelled even worse,
but I knew that my nostrils would soon adjust. The young woman at the counter
looked to be a teenager at most. She was clad all in black, except for the
series of silver rings on her ears and through her nose. It
strikes me
as comical that we humans intentionally poke holes in our bodies to supposedly
make ourselves more attractive, yet call dogs stupid for pleasing themselves by
rolling in something of foul fragrance.

I asked her
if I could talk to someone about a husky named Suds, and she pointed to a
half-open door next to the counter while she answered the phone. I took this to
mean that I could go on in, and did so. There, to my pleasant surprise, sat a
man holding one of Suds’s puppies in his lap.

He grinned
at me. He was thin and tan with a distinctive, high-bridged nose and a
particularly appealing smile. His eyes were darker than his light brown hair,
some errant locks covering the slight hint of wrinkles on his forehead. His
good looks were augmented by the fact that he was cradling a puppy. A
dog-loving man is infinitely more attractive to me than, well, someone like
Russell, though he had other qualities that made him attractive.

“Can I help
you, miss?” he asked. I couldn’t help but notice that he gave me an appraising
look, eyeing me at length as he spoke.

“Yes. Hi. My
name is Allida Babcock. I wanted to ask you about Suds and her puppies.”

“Ah. Great.”
Still seated, he held out the puppy to me. “This is one of her puppies I’ve got
now. Would you like to hold him?”

I did, of
course. Soon I was sitting in a desk chair and cradling a warm fuzzy body in my
arms. I nuzzled his soft fur, and the puppy licked my cheek. His sweet,
milk-scented breath was warm and pleasant on my skin.

What was a
bit worrisome to me was that Suds had allowed the dog to be taken out of her
sight. Mother dogs are almost always far too protective to allow a stranger to
remove a puppy until the offspring are at least five or six weeks old. Perhaps
Suds was becoming too stressed by being bounced from place to place in the past
couple of days to maintain her mothering role.

“We’re
calling him Fez because of his pattern of darker fur on his head. I’m John
White. I’m the kennel supervisor.”

“Kennel
supervisor? So you decide which dogs are adoptable.” This was a particularly
lame comment, but I was distracted by his looks and my concern for Suds and
family.

“That’s
right. Among other duties.”

“Ah,” I
said, nodding. The trouble with starting down a particularly dull
conversational path is that it’s hard to leap gracefully on to a better one.

I turned my
attention to the puppy in my lap and looped the circle of my thumb and index
finger around Fez’s paw. This was just about the right paw size for the prints
I’d seen. Holding the wiggly puppy, though, it occurred to me that puppies this
young weren’t steady on their feet and tended to take frequent rests. The
tracks I’d seen had appeared to have come from a surefooted canine.

When I
looked up from my study of the puppy’s paws, John was watching me, and I
realized I wasn’t being much of a conversationalist. “How is Suds doing?”

“She’s fine.
Though she’d be a lot happier if we could get her into a homier environment.”

“I can imagine,”
I murmured, weighing the pros and cons of volunteering my own residence.

He searched
my eyes, that marvelous smile of his catching my attention again. “You...sound
as though you’re personally familiar with her.”

“Is she
nearby?” I asked quickly, wanting to deflect further questions for the moment,
until I’d had the chance to assess Suds’s status for myself.

“Yes. We’re
keeping her in the office for now, where it’s quieter, but we’re hoping to get
her foster-adopted again very soon. Today, in fact.”

He rose and
held out his hands for me to return Fez to him. I stood up as well and
reluctantly returned the little ball of fur to him. John was taller than I
would have guessed him to be—an inch or two over six feet. Ah, well.
Nobody’s perfect. “We need to return this little guy to his mom.”

I followed
as he rounded the corner in the L-shaped room. This part of the room was
sectioned off, and there sat Suds and her other four puppies. Suds looked at me
and got up on
all fours long enough for me to give her a quick pat. She was
panting and began to pace the moment I stopped petting her. This was too small
a quarters for such an active breed as a husky. She needed to get out of here.

The fifth
puppy wiggled his way over to his brother and sisters. John showed me where the
sink was, and we washed our hands with an antibacterial liquid at the sink in
the office. Diseases such as kennel cough can spread so easily. He walked me
back over toward his desk afterward.

“Allida
Babcock,” John said, again eyeing me at length. “That name sounds familiar to
me.”

“So does the
name John White. Isn’t that some sort of a wild bird?”

He chuckled.
“No, that would be my brother, Bob White. Are you familiar with dog foster care
programs?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Would you
be willing to consider fostering Suds and family? We had a foster-adopt for
them, but that didn’t work out. I should tell you right off, though, that the
mother is not up for adoption, only the puppies.”

“I’m at
least partially aware of these dogs’ backgrounds. I live in Berthoud, directly
across the street from Cassandra Randon.”

He stiffened
and lowered his gaze. “That was such a shock. Mr. Randon brought the dogs back
yesterday. He told me about the circumstances.”

“Did you
know his wife?”

He lifted
one shoulder in a half-spirited shrug. “Met her briefly, is all. She was at one
of the lectures I gave the volunteers. But still, it’s such a shock. This has
never happened to us. Not since I’ve been here, anyway. To have a death in one
of our adoptive families.”

He was
staring at me intently and looked away the moment I met his gaze. Just then I
got the slightest sensation of something being wrong or off-kilter in his
attitude. The feeling passed as quickly as it came, and I dismissed it as being
the result of the subject matter. “Before I agree to foster the dogs myself,
there are a couple of questions I’d like to ask.”

“Fire away,”
he said, gesturing at the chair behind me while he reclaimed his own.

I pulled up
a green upholstered desk chair on wheels that matched his own and sat down.
Though this animal shelter was said to be better funded than others, this room,
like the office at the Humane Society in Boulder, was furnished with secondhand
furniture. The desks were old and scuffed, and the shelves that lined one wall
had seen better days. The old metal file cabinets were open and in a state of
some disarray. The computers, though, appeared to be in good shape.

“Cassandra
told me that Suds’s owner was currently in prison, and that’s why he couldn’t
take care of her and the pups.”

He raised an
eyebrow. “That’s not true. I wonder where she got that idea.”

So did I.
Perhaps Paul Randon had deliberately lied to his wife.

Cassandra
had told me that she’d gotten her information secondhand, from her husband,
Paul, but there was no reason for me to bring him up now. “You mean the owner
isn
‘t
in prison?”

“Not
anymore. He was. Now he’s at a halfway house. Mrs. Randon must have gotten the
wrong impression. I thought I made it clear that he was in the process of
getting reestablished after his release. His new landlord didn’t mind putting
up with the one dog, but objected to the five puppies.”

Maybe Paul
had simply slanted the information so that Cassandra would feel safer in
thinking that the man was behind bars. “What was he in for?” I asked, my choice
of phrasing making me sound to my own ear like some character on a cop show.

“Burglary, I
think was the charge. Nothing...violent, if that’s what you’re thinking.” John
gave me a sheepish smile. “Not to put thoughts in your head. You have no reason
to worry about Suds’s owner ever coming into contact with you.”

Now that he
said that, I
was
worried. “What’s Suds’s owner’s name?”

“I’m sorry,
Allida, but we don’t give out that information. All of our adoptions are
handled confidentially. Every now and then we get someone who changes his mind
about a pet he’s put up for adoption after it’s too late. We can’t allow the
new owner to have to risk getting harassed by the previous owner, or vice
versa.”

I studied
John’s handsome features. Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t say what.
Maybe it was John’s nervous mannerisms, the way he kept shifting his vision to
the door behind me as if he expected some monster to burst in at any given
moment. “You did tell the police about him, though, didn’t you? I mean, just in
case he had anything to do with Cassandra Randon’s murder.”

“Of course.
I called them the moment Mr. Randon came back with the dogs yesterday and told
us what happened.” He ran a hand over his tousled hair. “I have to admit that I
was relieved when I spoke to the police again this morning and learned that
Suds’s owner had an alibi. I’d have felt partly responsible if he’d been
involved in the murder somehow, knowing we had to have let security slip for
Suds’s owner to have been able to locate the Randons.”

“The police
told you that he had an alibi?” That was surprising to me. They seemed
reluctant to tell
me
anything.

John raised
his eyebrows at the question. “Come to think of it, they might’ve just been
telling me that to appease me so that I’d stop bugging them.” Again he was
looking at the door as he spoke. He rose, and I started to get up myself,
thinking he was leaving the room. He opened the door a crack, then sat back
down. “Sorry. It’s getting a bit stuffy in here. The sergeant from Berthoud...Millay,
isn’t it?” I nodded as he continued, “He assured me that the alibi was
ironclad.”

“And so you’re
absolutely confident that there is no risk whatsoever in allowing Suds to be
foster-adopted again?”

“Absolutely.
That the Randons happened to have recently gotten these dogs was nothing more
than a horrible coincidence.”

“Okay.”

“So you’ll
foster them?”

“I’d be
happy to.”

“That’s
great, Allida. Thanks!” He gave me another of his wonderful smiles, his white
teeth accentuating his even tan. “I’ll get the paperwork together.”

He started
to walk me to the front desk. “What do you do for a living, Allida, if you don’t
mind my asking?”

“I’m a dog
behaviorist in Boulder. Though I’m not technically making a ‘living’ at it.
More like scraping by till I’m established.”

His eyes lit
up. “No wonder your name sounded so familiar. You do volunteer work for the
shelter in Boulder, right?”

I was
flattered that he’d heard of me. “Yes, I just recently started there.”

“I hear you’re
excellent. How lucky for them.”

He waited
with me while I quickly filled out the forms and handed them to him. He scanned
them for a moment then asked, “You say you live in Berthoud?”

“Temporarily.
I’m staying with my mother for a few weeks till I can find a rental in Boulder.
In fact I’ll need to let my mother know we’re having canine company for a few
weeks.”