A Big Little Life

dogs— I will always love you and bring you safely through troubled times —and little in life is as satisfying as keeping promises.

XII
things that go bump in the night
    TRIXIE HAD BEEN with us a year when she did something nearly as mystifying as her reaction when I told her that I knew she was an angel posing as a dog.
    Gerda and I were sitting up in bed, reading, about ready to turn off the lights and go to sleep.
    Trixie got up from her bed to get a drink. On her way back to the corner, she performed one of those cute-as-it-gets stretches in which her rump raised high, the rest of her sloped down toward the floor, her legs thrust straight out in front of her, and her toes spread wide as if all the weariness in her muscles were pouring forward through her body and draining out through her forepaws.
    No sooner had she settled down than she leaped up again, ran past our bed, and vanished through the open door into the upstairs hall.
    Because we had looked up from our books to watch Trixie stretch, our attention remained on her when she hurriedly split. She had never raced off like this before, and we both thought, Intruder .
    I had set the perimeter alarm prior to settling down to read, but perhaps someone had already been in the house when I activated the system. Such an unlikely event had happened a couple of years earlier, before we had Trixie.
    One night, we went out for dinner and forgot to arm the security system. When we came home, we entered from the garage, went straight up the main stairs to the master suite, locked the door behind us, and set the alarm to night mode, which engaged all doors and windows but also motion detectors in the hallways. We didn’t know an intruder was in the house, lurking in a second-floor study when we returned.
    The computerized voice of the alarm announced any change in conditions by way of the house music-system speakers. Therefore, the trespasser in the study knew he was trapped in that space by the motion detector in the hallway, which would trigger a siren and call the policewith a recorded message if he moved through its field of observation. Apparently, he settled down to wait and think.
    Feeling as safe as Pooh and Tigger in the most benign district of their entirely comfortable forest, Gerda and I got ready for bed, sat up reading for an hour or two, and then went to sleep. At two in the morning, the alarm screamed, and the Hal-9000 voice informed us that someone had opened the study window.
    Because that window was on the second floor, fifteen feet above the walkway along the south side of the house, reachable from outside only with a ladder, we assumed the alarm must be false. After turning off the security system, I went to the study to check for corrosion of the contact points between window and sill—and discovered the window open.
    Yikes. I hurried back to the master bedroom, armed myself, and returned cautiously to the study and peered out of the open window. No ladder. Someone had opened the window to flee the house, not to invade. He had dropped onto a rain-shelter roof over a first-floor side door directly below, cracking a couple of cedar shingles, and from there he had jumped to the walkway.
    After brooding on his situation, the trapped intruder had most likely decided that the second-floor windows might not be tied into the alarm system. Many people save money by not wiring hard-to-reach windows.
    Fortunately, the folks from whom we bought the house were paranoid enough to wire even those openings thatcould be reached only by the ape from Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue . Otherwise, our uninvited guest might have escaped without anyone knowing that he’d been there. When the window was found open, I or Gerda would have assumed that the other had left it that way, for ventilation.
    Now, two years later, when Trixie sprang off her bed and raced into the upstairs hall, we wondered if the intruder had returned or perhaps had recommended our accommodations to a criminal pal. Trixie neither growled nor barked, but then she rarely did either, and it was possible that she hoped the intruder might have a cookie or a tennis ball.
    When I followed her into the hall, I found her standing near the door to Gerda’s office. She was gazing up, as though making eye contact with someone about my height, smiling and wagging her tail.
    I said, “Trixie, what’s happening?”
    Ignoring me, still appearing to be attentive to someone I could not see, she