Ruffly Speaking (27 page)

Naturally,
I thought, coming to earth abruptly,
there always is.
For instance, take the time Rowdy ended up next to that Kees bitch on the sits and downs. The hitch? She absolutely must have been starting to come in season, or Rowdy’d never, ever have behaved like that. And the Retrieve on Flat? Rowdy never refuses the command. He retrieves anything, anytime, anywhere. The hitch? A silly technicality, an arbitrary rule. To qualify, the dumbbell he brings back has to be his
own.

“What hitch is that?”

Rita picked up the Yap Zapper and fingered it lightly. “The maximum range is what? Twelve feet?

“That’s—”

“That’s not a hitch,” I said. “There must be a dozen of these things on the market, probably more, and they’re not all the same. The idea of this one is that you just put it in the dog’s kennel with him or else you put it in the room with him, and then when he barks, it goes off automatically; or else, if you’re there, you press the button yourself. But they’re all different. Some of them aren’t even all that high frequency. You can hear them; they’re perfectly audible to people; they’re just really loud. All they do is substitute for someone standing there and screaming at the dog whenever he barks. On some of them, you can adjust the sensitivity so that if the dog just whines or whatever, nothing happens. Some of them react only to barking, not to whining or howling. There’s a really big one that’s meant for kennels, which is really unfair, I think, because it blasts all the dogs even if it’s only one dog that barks. Some of them aren’t even for barking; they’re for any behavior you don’t want. They’re in all the catalogs. I’ll show you.”

Which
catalogs? Are you serious? No, not J. Crew and not L.L. Bean. Victoria’s Secret? Well, if your OFA excellent, CERF clear champion bitch is proving totally impossible to breed, anything’s worth a try, I guess, but if you honestly don’t know what I mean by
the
catalogs, I am now about to save you thousands of dollars in pet supplies. No kidding. R.C. Steele, color glossy catalog, fifty-dollar minimum order: 800-872-3773 or if you use a TDD, 800-468-8776. Cherrybrook, no illustrations, just a price list, but no minimum order, and a portion of each sale is donated to the Morris Animal Foundation: 800-524-0820. Tell ’em Holly sent you. And, no, I don’t receive a commission. So why am I revealing the inner secrets of the Sacred Brotherhood and Sisterhood of The Fancy? So you’ll stay out of pet shops that sell dogs. Why do that? Puppy mills. But that’s a whole other story.

The Cherrybrook and R.C. Steele catalogs are the essential First Books of the Kennel Supply Testament, our

Deep Discount Torah, so to speak, but before long, Rita and I were also leafing through Foster & Smith, UPCO, Master Animal Care, New England Serum, and eight or ten others, including at least two apocrypha, which is to say, yuppie-targeted, reverse-discount (double-markup) catalogs. After Rita finally quit ridiculing such everyday items as plastic-lined polka-dot lace-trimmed canine sanitary panties and a fluoride-impregnated rawhide chew in the form of a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, she got herself under control, turned to the right pages, and verified what I’d been saying. In brief, if you wanted to explode auditory dynamite in your dog’s ears, there were a lot of ways to do it—audible or inaudible to people, bark activated, manually operated, with or without adjustable sensitivity, and with or without a lot of other options, too: waterproof cases, happy tunes to reward the dog for good behavior, a maximum effective range varying all the way from a mere ten feet up to a whopping seventy-five feet.

I picked up the Yap Zapper again. “This would probably do it, if you stood right outside the window. Except, for all we know, I guess, it could be inside—one of those big kennel models? It could be
any
of the ones that people can’t hear. The point is, this
is
what’s doing it, something like this. It has to be.”

Rita looked sad and tired. “That isn’t really the Point, is it? The real point is, Holly, what a vicious, vile thing for someone to do. And to a
hearing
dog!”

“Ruffly’s kept right on working,” I said, “but, yeah, it could’ve gone the other way, and, Rita, Stephanie’s had Ruffly for over a year, and, by now, she takes it for granted that he’ll do the listening. So besides being really hard on him, it could’ve been... But, Rita, we don’t necessarily know.... It is possible that it’s all a mistake.”

“I don’t see how.”

I hesitated to raise the topic, but it had to be said. “In one of the catalogs? Maybe in more than one, there’s one of these ultrasound things that’s actually marketed as, uh...” As my voice dropped, my gaze rose involuntarily upward. “As, uh, the simple solution to the problem of your neighbor’s noisy dog...”

“Oh,” Rita said flatly.

“The idea is, uh, no direct confrontation. Or what to do when you’ve asked the people a million times, and the dog is still driving you crazy.”

“Yes, I
get
the idea.”

“So it’s possible that it isn’t even aimed at Ruffly. Ruffly can’t be the only dog around there, and he barks now and then, but he’s not a nuisance barker. As I said, those gadgets aren’t selective. If they get triggered, they just blast away. Any dog in the vicinity gets hit, not just the one making the noise. Also, whoever’s doing it doesn’t necessarily...” I didn’t finish the sentence aloud. The salt on Alice Savery’s lawn? Ivan had known that the salt would kill the grass, of course, but he was simply too young to grasp Alice Savery’s devotion to what struck me as her companion vegetables. “Rita, it’s even remotely possible that Morris Lamb
owned
one of those things and that it’s still in the house. Maybe if the batteries are weak... like smoke detectors? You know how they go off when the batteries are low?”

“That’s a very benign hypothesis.”

“It is,” I agreed. “And Doug... Well, I’m not sure, but Doug... Doug Winer was Morris’s partner, and it’s his house now, and he’d probably know if Morris had bought one of those things. And, of course, Doug would know exactly what something like that could do to a hearing dog, and he’s such a hovery landlord, and he knows about Ruffly’s episodes, so even if he’d forgotten that Morris had one of these gadgets, he certainly would’ve remembered by now.”

Rita smiled sourly. “Or he’s hit on a strange way to deliver an eviction notice.”

“Oh, evicting Stephanie is probably the last thing Doug wants to do,” I said. “It’s true that Doug’s cousin, who’s an old friend of Stephanie’s, did pressure him to rent to her, but why would he want her out? She’s got to be a great tenant—”

“Don’t remind me. Hard to find.”

“Hard to find,” I agreed. “And Doug lives with his elderly parents, and if he’d wanted to move the whole family to Highland Street, he had the chance, right after Morris died. And he didn’t. He stayed in Brookline with his parents, and he rented Morris’s house to Stephanie. Besides, I met his father at a show, a while ago, and I really don’t think that this would be a great time to move him anywhere. He—Mr. Winer—is... I guess he’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and it seems to me it would be pretty disorienting for him to move from where he is. But that’s... You don’t know Doug. If he wanted Stephanie out, he’d just... Come to think of it, I’m not sure what he’d do. He wouldn’t just order her out. He’d be very polite about it, I think. He’d keep apologizing, and he’d fuss about where she was going to go, and he’d give her all the time she needed, that kind of thing.” Rita looked skeptical. My friendship with Doug Winer was a mere acquaintanceship, but Rita didn’t know him at all. “Holly, tell me something.” She took the Yap Zapper from my hand. “Just how accessible are these things?”

“Well, you just saw. They’re in the catalogs.”

“Have you ever seen one anywhere else? In a store?” I tried to remember. “Not that I can think of. Maybe at shows, but I don’t think so. As far as I know, they’re mainly a catalog item.”

Thus accessible to...? I remembered the stack of kennel supply catalogs on the cookbook shelves in Morris Lamb’s kitchen, catalogs available to Morris, of course and to Doug Winer and to his tenants, Stephanie and, of course, Matthew. And only a few hours earlier, I’d seen Ivan with the same catalogs.

Rita patted the R.C. Steele catalog, which sat on top of the pile on my table. “Holly, does Stephanie order from these?”

“She might. But Morris Lamb did, I’m sure—Morris was a dog person—and his catalogs are still there, at his house. At least I assume they were Morris’s. But Stephanie wouldn’t... Rita, why would Stephanie...?”

“I wasn’t thinking of her,” Rita said. “I was wondering about the son.”

“Matthew?”

“Matthew. Didn’t you or Leah tell me that it came as something of a surprise to him, having his mother move here with him?”

“Yes.” I hesitated. “On the other hand, Rita, he seems quite devoted to Stephanie. That’s how he talks about her, and, before she got Ruffly, apparently, Matthew rigged up gadgets to help her, and he’s still the one who checks her phones, stuff like that.”

Rita made one of those noncommittal therapist noises.

“He’s too polite to go around bad-mouthing his mother,” I argued, “but the sense I have, honestly, is that he’s, if anything, more devoted to her than most kids that age are to their parents. Like tonight? Stephanie is having this little barbecue.”

“I know. She invited me. I’m going.”

“Good. Well, Matthew and Leah are going to be there, and a lot of kids that age would refuse. It’s the last thing they’d want to do. But, you know, I’m just guessing-

It really is hard to tell how Matthew feels about anything. Except Leah. How he feels about her is pretty obvious.” I thought for a second and added, “And dogs. You can’t miss it. One thing that’s perfectly obvious is that Matthew does
not
like dogs.”

27

 Stephanie Benson was a little too heavy of body and mind to approach cuteness, but when I aimed the Yap Zapper at her and said, “Okay, stick ’em up,” her wide grin displayed those clean, square teeth, and she dutifully raised her hands. I pressed the button, the little red light blinked, and, instead of lowering her arms, Stephanie raised them high, waved her hands from the wrist, and made her fingers dance gleefully.

“The applause of the deaf,” she explained.

Although science would also have had us aim the Yap Zapper at Ruffly, Stephanie and I agreed to assume that we’d found the cause of the dog’s problems. Before trying the device, we’d banished Ruffly to the deck, where Doug Winer was puttering with the valve of the gas grill, and, to make doubly sure of sparing Ruffly any discomfort, we’d gone all the way to the living room, at the front of the house, before activating the Yap Zapper. When the experiment was successfully completed, we immediately returned to the kitchen, not only because Stephanie was in the middle of preparing food for what she persisted in calling Ruffly’s birthday party, but also because she was determined to find out whether the Yap Zapper would explain her problems with the telephone as miraculously as it had demystified both Ruffly’s episodes and the apparent malfunction of her aids.

“Stephanie, I honestly don’t think—” I started to protest.

“What harm will it do? We’ll give it a little try, and if the phone rings, there we are!”

“It’s only this extension? The white phone?”

In Morris Lamb’s day, as I’ve mentioned, the kitchen had been a cheerful jumble of great food and pretty dogs, but Stephanie kept the counters and the granite work island tidy. The only area that looked even slightly messy was what I suppose a decorator would have called the communication center. The mounting bracket for Morris’s phone now held a couple of little plastic jacks from which sprouted a tangle of wires that led to a gray answering machine and to Stephanie’s telephone on the counter, which also held a jar of tiny dog biscuits, a pad of bright pink While You Were Out message slips, and a tray of pens and pencils. The phone was one of those full-size, enhanced amplification, big-button AT&T white models with fire, police, and ambulance symbols on the top row of buttons, and immense numbers and slightly smaller letters on the buttons underneath, as if hearing loss put people in constant need of emergency aid and simultaneously impaired their vision and their manual dexterity.