All Shots

really something. Gabrielle’s bichon, Molly, won her breed but went nowhere in the Group. Gabrielle, however, wasn’t yet a hardcore show type, which is to say that she honestly did not mind losing. Give her a few more years with my father, and that attitude would change.
    When Buck, Gabrielle, the three dogs, and I finally reached Cambridge, I got my guests settled in their room, and we sat at the kitchen table and ate beef stew. My father was in a good mood and on good behavior. Why not? He’d embarrassed me at a show, and he’d been more or less right about Teller. Also, since I’d managed to keep Buck ignorant of the murder and the Holly Winter mix-up, he had no excuse to turn protective. Following Phyllis’s suggestion, I got him talking about blue malamutes. Buck knew that I was active in Alaskan Malamute Rescue of New England and in the national group, the Alaskan Malamute Assistance League, and he knew that Phyllis Hamilton also did malamute rescue. Consequently, he made the natural mistake of assuming that the blue malamute in the photo was a rescue dog. I didn’t correct him. Unfortunately, he had nothing useful to say. He knew the names of a few old-time malamute kennels, including Sena Lak, Blue Ice, and Sugarbear, that had produced blue, and he recommended an article I’d already read, a piece written by the late Jane Wilson-Adickes.
    Although I’d warned Kevin about Buck’s visit and implored him to say nothing to my father about the murder, I was still worried throughout the meal that Kevin might pop in and mention the dead woman and the possible identity theft, but the fear was needless. Over dessert, Gabrielle talked with delighted animation about the DEA’s discovery that someone had been growing marijuana on her land. In itself, the incident amounted to nothing. The property was a forty-acre lot in a numbered township that didn’t even have a name. The neighbors, if you can call them that, were big paper companies rather than people, and some unknown person had taken advantage of the isolation of Gabrielle’s land to grow marijuana in what was evidently a small clearing. Gabrielle and her late husband had bought the lot twenty years earlier. She paid taxes on it but had never so much as seen it. When I extracted details about the drug agent’s visit, I realized that it had been pro forma; the agent had informed Gabrielle about the situation, and that had been that. I am proud to report that instead of taking Buck to task for having started a rumor that would be broadcast throughout the dog fancy, I kept my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut.
    Buck, Gabrielle, and Molly left early on Sunday morning. It was a wet, dreary day, and I found myself missing Steve as well as wishing that Leah were still living with us and that Rita were home or returning at any minute. For once, there wasn’t a single dog-related event nearby that I wanted to attend. There were friends I could’ve called but no one I wanted to see, and the prospect of going alone to a concert or a bookstore made me feel like Eleanor Rigby. Work? On a Sunday? I’m my own employer and a good one: I give myself weekends off. I do household chores, of course, as I did that morning. I changed the sheets in the bedroom, vacuumed, and performed the routine task required to keep Sammy’s beloved Pink Piggy working. The toy that Steve and I called Pink Piggy was a Dr. Noy’s toy, a purple pig, a plush toy that had a great feature: the squeaker was replaceable. For reasons that baffled me, Sammy had never torn Pink Piggy to shreds, but he killed the squeakers all the time. I always kept a supply of fresh ones on hand. It took almost no time to rip open the Velcro on Pink Piggy’s back, remove the pouch inside, pull out the dead squeaker, slip in the new one, insert the pouch, and close the toy up. Then I had to repeat the process because, in the manner of Betty Burley and Kimi, Pink Piggy manifested itself in three simultaneous incarnations that were indistinguishable from one another and thus all went by the same name.
    When I’d finished restoring Pink Piggy’s voice, I spent some time training Rowdy and then Sammy. After that, I checked my e-mail, printed out a fresh copy of the photo of the blue malamute, ran off more copies of the lost-dog flyer, and then, on inspiration, searched through the Alaskan Malamute Registry Pedigree Program, a database with information about more than 79,000 malamutes from all over the world.