All Shots

The database includes all the malamutes in the American Kennel Club Stud Book Register, in studbooks from other countries, and in other published sources. The simplest use of the program is to generate the family trees beloved by fanciers of purebred dogs, but it can also be used to search for malamutes that meet particular criteria, for example, dogs with the sire or dam you enter; dogs with a specified kennel name, breeder, or owner; dogs with a given birth date; and so forth. A little poking around in the database, however, soon demonstrated what the program’s creator, Dan Anderson, had once told me, namely, that searching by color had more than a few hitches. Among other things, malamutes come in a bewildering variety of colors; knowledgeable people use a great variety of terms for the myriad of colors; and worse yet, official systems, which radically oversimplify coat color, have changed over the years. For instance, malamute fanciers may disagree about whether a particular all-white dog’s shading is biscuit, cream, or off-white; and once-popular terms like wolf gray and wolf sable have fallen out of use because neither the American Kennel Club nor malamute fanciers are eager to encourage the general public to confuse purebred Alaskan malamutes with wolves or wolf dogs. Well, I’ll skip to the result, which was that my search yielded only a handful of malamutes coded as blue. Next, I searched for dogs with the word blue in their registered names. That search identified 563 dogs, including some that clearly were—or had been—the real thing and not simply dogs named for blues songs. For instance, the color code “ChclBlWh” obviously meant the charcoal-black shade of blue, and some of the dogs bore the names of kennels known to produce—or to have produced—blue, including Phyllis’s Benchmark, as well as Sena Lak, Warlock, Blue Ice, Sugarbear, Snosquall, Ice Age, Crevasse, and Blueline.
    Whoops! Maybe I need to explain the names of registered purebred dogs. Take Sammy. His registered name is Jazzland’s As Time Goes By . Jazzland is the kennel name of his breeder, Cindy Neely. In daily life, of course, Steve and I make fools of ourselves over dogs all the time, but not to the extent of calling our dog by saying, “Come, Jazzland’s As Time Goes By!” Really, there are limits. So, Sammy’s call name is Sammy.
    At the end of about an hour with the database, when I started to search for dogs with potentially bluish names like Cornflower, Denim, Ultramarine, Sapphire, and Wedgwood, I could feel my thoughts turning various shades of Alice, baby, electric, robin’s egg, or possibly neon blue, so I quit for the day and ran to the little store on Concord Avenue for milk. Rain was still falling, and the sky was a deep slate, gunmetal, steel, or...
    Anyway, as I was coming out of the shop, I ran into Mel-lie, who was swathed in a gigantic red plastic poncho that made her look like a Mylar balloon. When we’d exchanged greetings, I asked what she was doing here. As I suspected, she’d been to Mass at Saint Peter’s. Neither of us had any news about Strike. I was carrying some lost-dog flyers that ^ d intended to put around my neighborhood, but I gave ’-hem to Mellie instead. I said that I’d been sending e-mail. Did Mellie understand what I meant? Mellie said she’d been lighting candles and praying to the Virgin. Did I truly understand what she meant? In any case, so far, neither of us had a reply.
     

CHAPTER 13
     
    On that same Sunday morning, the other Holly Winter also searches databases. Those of interest to her, however, contain information on human beings and specifically on human beings named Holly Winter. The Argali directory lists eleven of us, two in Cambridge, of course, and the remaining nine dispersed throughout the United States in the manner of chain-store franchises, an image, I should note, that occurs to me, the dog-loving Holly Winter, and not to the unfanciful Holly Winter who thinks of images as graphics that display data. By searching other directories, she discovers 154 listings for us, but to her annoyance, there are many obvious duplications. Even so, she prints the complete listing of our addresses and phone numbers.
    As to her interest in me, she finds that the database for the City of Cambridge shows the property at 256 Concord Avenue as having a land area of 4,004 square feet; and the building, a living area of 2,819 square feet. The Exterior Wall Type is coded as