Watchers (16 page)

Before she spoke with Cornell about the dog, she needed to devise an approach that would somehow discourage him from thinking he could make a move on her if, in fact, he was like Streck.

When the telephone rang at a few minutes before five o’clock, Travis was emptying a can of Alpo into Einstein’s bowl. The retriever was watching with interest, licking his chops but waiting until the last scraps had been scraped from the can, exhibiting restraint.

Travis went for the phone, and Einstein went for the food. When no one answered Travis’s first greeting, he said hello again, and the dog glanced away from his bowl. When Travis still got no answer, he asked if anyone was on the line, which seemed to intrigue Einstein because the dog padded across the kitchen to look up at the receiver in Travis’s hand.

Travis hung up and turned away, but Einstein stood there, gazing at the wall phone.

“Probably a wrong number.”

Einstein glanced at him, then at the phone again.

“Or kids thinking they’re being clever.”

Einstein whined unhappily.

“What’s eating you?”

Einstein just stood there, riveted by the phone.

With a sigh, Travis said, “Well, I’ve had all the bewilderment I can handle for one day. If you’re going to wax mysterious, you’ll have to do it without me.”

He wanted to watch the early news before preparing dinner for himself, so he got a Diet Pepsi from the fridge and went into the living room, leaving the dog in peculiar communion with the telephone. He switched on the TV, sat in the big armchair, popped the tab on his Pepsi—and heard Einstein getting into some kind of trouble in the kitchen.

“What’re you doing out there?”

A clank. A clatter. The sound of claws scrabbling against a hard surface. A thump, and another.

“Whatever damage you do,” Travis warned, “you’re going to have to pay for. And how’re you going to earn the bucks? Might have to go up to Alaska and work as a sled dog.”

The kitchen got quiet. But only for a moment. Then there were a couple of clunks, a rattle, a rustle, more scrabbling of claws.

Travis was intrigued in spite of himself. He used the remote-control unit to mute the TV.

Something hit the kitchen floor with a bang.

Travis was about to go see what had happened, but before he rose from the chair, Einstein appeared. The industrious dog was carrying the telephone directory in his jaws. He must have leaped repeatedly at the kitchen counter where the book lay, pawing it, until he pulled it onto the floor. He crossed the living room and deposited the book in front of the armchair.

“What do you want?” Travis asked.

The dog nudged the directory with his nose, then gazed at Travis expectantly.

“You want me to call someone?”

“Woof.”

“Who?”

Einstein nosed the phone book again.

Travis said, “Now who would you want me to call? Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Old Yeller?”

The retriever stared at him with those dark, undoglike eyes, which were more expressive than ever but insufficient to communicate what the animal wanted.

“Listen, maybe you can read my mind,” Travis said, “but I can’t read yours.”

Whining in frustration, the retriever padded out of the room, disappearing around the corner into the short hallway that served the bath and two bedrooms.

Travis considered following, but he decided to wait and see what happened next.

In less than a minute, Einstein returned, carrying a gold-framed eight-by-ten photograph in his mouth. He dropped it beside the phone directory. It was the picture of Paula that Travis kept on the bedroom dresser. It had been taken on their wedding day, ten months before she died. She looked beautiful—and deceptively healthy.

“No good, boy. I can’t call the dead.”

Einstein huffed as if to say Travis was thickheaded. He went to a magazine rack in the corner, knocked it over, spilling its contents, and came back with an issue of
Time,
which he dropped beside the gold-framed photograph. With his forepaws, he scraped at the magazine, pulling it open and leafing through its pages, tearing a few in the process.

Moving to the edge of the armchair, leaning forward, Travis watched with interest.

Einstein paused a couple of times to study the open pages of the magazine, then continued to paw through it. Finally, he came to an automobile advertisement that prominently featured a striking brunette model. He looked up at Travis, down at the ad, up at Travis again, and woofed.

“I don’t get you.”

Pawing the pages again, Einstein found an ad in which a smiling blonde was holding a cigarette. He snorted at Travis.

“Cars and cigarettes? You want me to buy you a car and a pack of Virginia Slims?”

After another trip to the overturned magazine rack, Einstein returned with a copy of a real-estate magazine that still showed up in the mail every month even though Travis had been out of the racket for two years. The dog pawed through that one as well until he found an ad that featured a pretty brunette real-estate saleswoman in a Century 21 jacket.

Travis looked at Paula’s photograph, at the blonde smoking the cigarette, at the perky Century 21 agent, and he remembered the other ad with the brunette and the automobile, and he said, “A woman? You want me to call . . . some woman?”

Einstein barked.

“Who?”

With his jaws, Einstein gently took hold of Travis’s wrist and tried to pull him out of the chair.

“Okay, okay, let go. I’ll follow you.”

But Einstein was taking no chances. He would not let go of Travis’s wrist, forcing his master to walk in a half stoop all the way across the living room and dining room, into the kitchen, to the wall phone. There, he finally released Travis.

“Who?” Travis asked again, but suddenly he understood. There was only one woman whose acquaintance both he and the dog had made. “Not the lady we met in the park today?”

Einstein began to wag his tail.

“And you think that’s who just called us?”

The tail wagged faster.

“How could you know who was on the line? She didn’t say a word. And what are you up to here, anyway? Matchmaking?”

The dog woofed twice.

“Well, she was certainly pretty, but she wasn’t my type, fella. A little strange, didn’t you think?”

Einstein barked at him, ran to the kitchen door and jumped at it twice, turned to Travis and barked again, ran around the table, barking all the way, dashed to the door and jumped at it once more, and gradually it became apparent that he was deeply disturbed about something.

About the woman.

She had been in some kind of trouble this afternoon in the park. Travis remembered the bastard in the running shorts. He had offered to help the woman, and she had refused. But had she reconsidered and phoned him a few minutes ago, only to discover that she did not have the courage to explain her plight?

“You really think that’s who called?”

The tail started wagging again.

“Well . . . even if it was her, it’s not wise to get involved.”

The retriever rushed at him, seized the right leg of his jeans, and shook the denim furiously, nearly tugging Travis off balance.

“All right, already! I’ll do it. Get me the damn directory.”

Einstein let go of him and raced out of the room, slipping on the slick linoleum. He returned with the directory in his jaws.

Only as Travis took the phone book did he realize that he had expected the dog to understand his request. The animal’s extraordinary intelligence and abilities were now things that Travis took for granted.

With a jolt, he also realized that the dog would not have brought the directory to him in the living room if it had not understood the purpose of such a book.

“By God, fur face, you
have
been well named, haven’t you?”

Although Nora usually ate dinner no earlier than seven, she was hungry. The morning walk and the glass of brandy had given her an appetite that even thoughts of Streck could not spoil. She didn’t feel like cooking, so she prepared a platter of fresh fruit and some cheese, plus a croissant heated in the oven.

Nora usually ate dinner in her room, in bed with a magazine or book, because she was happiest there. Now, as she prepared a platter to take upstairs, the telephone rang.

Streck.

It must be him. Who else? She received few calls.

She froze, listening to the phone. Even after it stopped, she leaned against the kitchen counter, feeling weak, waiting for the ringing to start again.

When Nora Devon did not answer her telephone, Travis was ready to go back to the evening news on TV, but Einstein was still agitated. The retriever leaped up against the counter, pawed at the directory, pulled it to the floor again, took it in his jaws, and hurried out of the kitchen.

Curious about the dog’s next move, Travis followed and found him waiting at the front door with the phone book still in his mouth.

“What now?”

Einstein put one paw on the door.

“You want to go out?”

The dog whined, but the sound was muffled by the directory in his mouth.

“What’re you going to do with the phone book out there? Bury it like a bone? What’s up?”

Although he received answers to none of his questions, Travis opened the door and let the retriever out into the golden, late-afternoon sunshine. Einstein dashed straight to the pickup parked in the driveway. He stood at the passenger door, looking back with what might have been impatience.

Travis walked to the truck and looked down at the retriever. He sighed. “I suspect you want to go somewhere, and I suspect you don’t have in mind the offices of the telephone company.”

Dropping the directory, Einstein jumped up, put his forepaws against the door of the truck and stood there, looking over his shoulder at Travis. He barked.

“You want me to look up Miss Devon’s address in the phone book and go there. Is that it?”

One woof.

“Sorry,” Travis said. “I know you liked her, but I’m not in the market for a woman. Besides, she’s not my type. I already told you that. And I’m not her type, either. Fact is, I have a hunch
nobody’s
her type.”

The dog barked.

“No.”

The dog dropped to the ground, rushed at Travis, and took hold of one leg of his jeans again.

“No,” he said, reaching down and grabbing Einstein by the collar. “There’s no point chewing up my wardrobe, because I’m not going.”

Einstein let go, twisted out of his grasp, and sprinted to the long bed of brightly blooming impatiens, where he started to dig furiously, tossing mangled flowers onto the lawn behind him.

“What’re you doing now, for God’s sake?”

The dog kept digging industriously, working his way through the bed, back and forth, apparently bent on totally destroying it.

“Hey, stop that!” Travis hurried toward the retriever.

Einstein fled to the other end of the front yard and commenced digging a hole in the grass.

Travis went after him.

Einstein escaped once more to another corner of the lawn, where he began ripping out more grass, then to the birdbath, which he tried to undermine, then back to what was left of the impatiens.

Unable to catch the retriever, Travis finally halted, gasped for breath, and shouted, “Enough!”

Einstein stopped digging in the flowers and raised his head, snaky trailers of coral-red impatiens dangling from his mouth.

“We’ll go,” Travis said.

Einstein dropped the flowers and came out of the ruins, onto the lawn— warily.

“No tricks,” Travis promised. “If it means that much to you, then we’ll go see the woman. But God knows what I’m going to say to her.”

With her dinner platter in one hand and a bottle of Evian in the other, Nora went along the downstairs hallway, comforted by the sight of lights blazing in every room. On the upstairs landing, she used her elbow to flick the switch for the second-floor hall lights. She would need to include a lot of lightbulbs in her next grocery order because she intended to leave all the lights burning day and night for the foreseeable future. It was an expense she did not in the least begrudge.

Still buoyed by the brandy, she began to sing softly to herself as she headed for her room: “Moon River, wider than a mile . . .”

She stepped through the door. Streck was lying on the bed.

He grinned and said, “Hi, babe.”

For an instant she thought he was a hallucination, but when he spoke she knew he was real, and she cried out, and the platter fell from her hand, scattering fruit and cheese across the floor.

“Oh my, what an awful mess you’ve made,” he said, sitting up and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. He was still wearing his running shorts, athletic socks, and running shoes; nothing else. “But there’s no need to clean it up now. There’s other business to take care of first. I been waiting a long time for you to come upstairs. Waiting and thinking about you . . . getting primed for you . . .” He stood. “And now it’s time to teach you what you’ve never learned.”

Nora could not move. Could not breathe.

He must have come to the house directly from the park, arriving before she did. He had forced entry, leaving no trace of a break-in, and he’d been waiting here on the bed all the time she’d been sipping brandy in the kitchen. There was something about his
waiting
up here that was creepier than anything else he had done, waiting and teasing himself with the promise of her, getting a kick out of listening to her putter around downstairs in ignorance of his presence.

When he was finished with her, would he kill her?

She turned and ran into the second-floor hallway.

As she put her hand on the newel post at the head of the stairs and started down, she heard Streck behind her.