All Shots

dog training, but if you’re hungry, I’ve got chicken that I’ll be glad to share.”
    Five minutes later, Kevin was seated at my kitchen table with a can of Bud in front of him and his massive hands clamped over his ears. As I’ve said, he’s cute. The gesture was, however, practical and justified: I was feeding Rowdy, Kimi, and Sammy, which is to say, three exemplary specimens of the most stunningly beautiful, inventively brilliant, and passionately food-driven breed ever to set gorgeous snowshoe paw on the fortunate planet Earth. Rowdy and Kimi were hitched to doors at opposite ends of the kitchen, Sammy was in a wire crate, I was dribbling safflower oil onto a combination of Eagle Pack and EVO in three stainless steel bowls, and all three dogs were screaming, screeching, hollering, bellowing, and bouncing up and down as if their last meal had been weeks ago instead of a mere ten hours earlier. Ages ago, I’d read the report of a small study that compared the behavior of malamute puppies and wolf cubs. Whereas the little wolves showed a healthy interest in meals, the baby malamutes went nuts around the food dish. That’s my paraphrase, of course, but the point is that instead of saying that voracious eaters wolf down dinner, we really ought to say that they malamute it down. Anyway, to show my understanding and respect for the pack hierarchy, I fed Rowdy first, then Kimi, then Sammy. By the time Kimi’s bowl hit the floor, Rowdy was flat on his belly with his dish gripped between his front paws and his face in his dinner, and by the time I’d slipped Sammy’s food into his crate and shut its door, Rowdy’s bowl was empty. To someone accustomed to normal dogs, malamute mealtimes can be a shock, but Kevin was used to the madness, which was over in almost no time.
    I then let Rowdy and Kimi out into the yard, let Sammy out of his crate, and joined Kevin at the table. “What must’ve happened,” I said, “was that someone confused the name of that poor woman with the name of the person who found the body. Me. Holly Winter. I’m sorry you thought—”
    “It wasn’t that,” Kevin said. “It was the ID.”
    “The other Holly Winter. So that’s who it is! The poor woman! Kevin, what a weird coincidence. Actually, it’s the second one today. The second mix-up. This is freakish. Some guy on a motorcycle was here looking for her. No wonder he was having trouble finding her. Now I know why.”
    Kevin said, “I thought you didn’t believe in coincidence.”
    “I don’t.” I paused. “Usually.”
    The theory is that behind every so-called coincidence lies a series of connections, some small, some large, that, if traced back far enough, lead inevitably to the great source of meaning and purpose in this otherwise senseless universe, namely, dogs. As a theory, this one may not initially seem to be right up there with relativity, for example, or evolution by means of natural selection, but I have seen its predictive value demonstrated countless times throughout my life and thus should have known better than to append that foolish usually.
    “I knew she lived in Cambridge,” I said. “The other Holly Winter. Kevin, this is so horrible. I wandered back there, behind that house, looking for someone’s lost dog, and when I saw... it was sickening. Her body was right by the door, just on the other side of the glass door. Everything had been thrown around. Anyway, when this biker was here, I looked up her address for him, but it was off Kirkland Street. She must’ve moved. I used an old phone book. I’ve never met her, but I know a little bit about her. We had the same doctor for a while, and one time I called, and the doctor said, ‘Well, well, how’s the bladder infection?’ I didn’t have one. She did. She had something to do with Harvard—a graduate student or a lecturer or something like that. I am so sorry!”
    “It isn’t her house,” Kevin said. “It looks like she was house-sitting. There’s a suitcase and some clothes in one of the bedrooms. And long lists about taking care of tropical fish. Instructions.”
    “The tanks had been broken. Knocked over.”
    “Some of them. There’s more all over the place.”
    “Whose house is it?”
    “A doctor. Young guy. Dr. Ho. He’s in Africa with some kind of medical group.”
    “This is going to sound irrelevant, but do you happen to know a woman named Mellie who lives right near there? Two houses away.”
    Kevin grew up in Cambridge