All Shots

she’d have a comfy lap.
    When she’d ushered me into a spacious hallway filled with gigantic houseplants, I said, “Thank you for calling. I have no idea what’s going on, but we’ll find out. All of my own dogs are definitely accounted for. I am mystified.”
    In a guilt-inducing tone, she said, “He is a very sweet dog. Very friendly. And he was starving, poor thing.” As she spoke, her eyes darted down and then left and right, as if she were checking to see whether something was there. “Donald!” she called. “Donald!”
    As you’ll have guessed, I assumed that Donald was the little terrier who’d mysteriously failed to herald my arrival and whose presence Donna Yappel had been seeking when she’d scanned the floor.
    “The husky is in the yard,” she said to me as I followed her to what proved to be a large kitchen with stainless-steel appliances, granite counters, and cherry cabinets and woodwork. “Donald! Oh, there you are!”
    I nearly gasped. My sense that Donna Yappel owned a terrier turned out to be almost correct. The incorrect part was this: Donna Yappel didn’t own a dog; rather, she was married to one, and a handsome one at that. His breed was unmistakable. Donald Yappel was an Irish terrier. His hair and his neatly trimmed beard were wheaten and were, as the AKC standard says, “dense and wiry in texture.” His head was long, his skull was flat, and his eyes were not only dark brown but, and again I quote, “full of life, fire, and intelligence, showing an intense expression.”
    “This is Donald,” she said. “My husband.”
    Restraining the impulse to stroke his shoulder, I said, “I’m Holly Winter.” With heartfelt sincerity, I added, “Pleased to meet you.”
    His eyes crackling, Donald said, “Pleased to meet you, too, now that you’ve decided to take responsibility for your dog.”
    I know when to quit. “How did you happen to find him?” I asked.
    “Oh, he’s been around for a couple of days,” Donna said, “but it was only this morning that he showed up on our doorstep.”
    “Starving,” Donald said pointedly.
    “At first, I was a little afraid of him because of his size, but Donald lured him into the yard, and once he was there, we saw how friendly he is. He’s quite the clown! There, you see! He’s doing it right now!”
    Donna Yappel pointed to a glass door eerily like the one at Dr. Ho’s house. This door, however, gave me a view radically different from the one I’d had there. Just on the other side of the glass, lying on her back on a teak deck, waving her big white snowshoe paws in the air, eyeing the three of us, and begging for a belly rub, was a distinctly female Alaskan malamute. Her color was unusual. Indeed, it was the rarest color in the breed: blue. She looked just like her picture. I still had no idea where the blue malamute in the photo had come from, and I had no idea who she was, but I knew for certain where she’d gone and knew that she was right in front of me.
    I slid the door open, stepped onto the deck, and rubbed her white tummy. “We meet at last,” I said. Whispering so that the Yappels wouldn’t hear me, I added, “You’re safe now. You’re with one of your own.”
     

CHAPTER 19
     
    As a rescue volunteer, I’ve had it drummed into me that I’m to do everything by the book, which is to say, according to the procedures established by Betty Burley, the founder of our organization. “Leave a paper trail,” Betty is always reminding me, by which she means, among other things, that whenever an owner or a shelter surrenders a dog to us, I have to get a signed release stating, in brief, that the signer has the right to turn the dog over to us and that the dog is now ours. The Yappels, however, didn’t own the blue malamute. Furthermore, she wasn’t being surrendered to our organization, was she? Since she’d been found in Lexington, the proper agency to take possession of her was probably the local animal-control department, which would be required to hold her for a week or ten days or some such period of time to give her owner a chance to claim her. On the other hand, since she could be considered evidence in a homicide, the Cambridge Police Department and any county and state agencies involved in the murder investigation must have a claim on her, too. Betty Burley absolutely hated any ambiguity about ownership. In particular, she had what amounted to a cop’s loathing of any domestic disturbance. If I took in a