All Shots

rebellious claim that I, in contrast, would have licked the fingers the dog had lapped. Not so. Or not quite so. But it’s quite likely that I’d subsequently have fixed food for myself and happily eaten it without first washing my hands. As it’s said, better after a dog than after a person. The adage, by the way, is one I’ve been accused of misinterpreting. Specifically, I’ve been informed that the point I’m missing concerns the filth of human beings, whose dirtiness is said to exceed even the extreme foulness of dogs. Nonsense! The correct and true point concerns the microbial and spiritual purity of dogs, which is to say, their biological, not to mention cosmic, superiority to human beings.
    But Holly Winter would certainly disagree. The other Holly Winter, of course. An other. Another. Yet another.
     

CHAPTER 3
     
    The moment Leah answered her cell phone, I said, “Now Leah, I’m going to be blunt with you. You can be very high-handed, and I’m used to it, but this time, you’ve gone too far. You do not—repeat, not—let total strangers into my house and then just leave them here. I do not expect to arrive home and find bikers sitting in my kitchen, and I don’t like it, especially when you know perfectly well that Steve is away and Rita is away and I am alone in this house and—”
    “There was only one biker,” Leah said. “And the dogs were there.”
    All three were with me now in the fenced yard, where I was keeping an eye on them while using my cell. Steve was always comfortable letting all five dogs run together, but I was more cautious than he was. For one thing, if they ripped one another apart, I’d be unable to stitch them back together. Steve has a general veterinary practice, but he’s an excellent surgeon. Not that either of us encourages dogfights. As a dog writer and dog trainer, I know a lot about preventing them, and one of my rules is to be exceptionally careful if two of the dogs are intact male malamutes. Intact: unaltered, not neutered, possessed of the full male apparatus required to enter a dog in conformation at an American Kennel Club show. But more about that topic later. In fact, soon. Rowdy and his handsome young son, Sammy, were both entered on Saturday.
    “Sammy was in his crate,” Leah continued, “but I left Rowdy and Kimi loose. And it was twelve thirty or one. Steve and Rita would’ve been at work, not that Rita would—”
    Steve and I have the first two floors of the house. Rita, who is our friend as well as our tenant, rents the third-floor apartment. A clinical psychologist, she’d just left for a psychotherapy conference in Palm Springs, in other words, for a tax-deductible ten-day vacation. The conference itself didn’t actually start until tomorrow, Friday, and it ended on Sunday, but Rita had decided to treat herself to a week at a spa after the meetings were over. Cambridge psychotherapists are big on the idea that self-indulgence enhances mental hygiene. For all I know, Rita deducts the cost of manicures, pedicures, and hair coloring as if they were psychiatric treatments needed to maintain her emotional well-being.
    “Rita knows how to make phone calls, but you’re right. She’d have been seeing patients, and it’s probably a good thing she wasn’t here because I’d have had to listen to her interpretation of the Harley.”
    “The Harley was cool.”
    “What did I just say? Rita would’ve been interested in its symbolic value.”
    “Come on. You thought it was cool, too.”
    “Okay, it was cool. And the guy, Adam, wasn’t all that scary, but you still shouldn’t have left him here. Leah, I am not a nervous type, but at the moment, I’m aware that Steve and Rita are away, okay?”
    “I’m staying there tonight. And tomorrow night. We can’t move in until Saturday.”
    This was Thursday, September 7. Leah had spent the summer working at Steve’s clinic and living with us. She was beginning her senior year, and the prospect of having her leave Greater Boston was breaking my heart. And all because damned Harvard didn’t have a school of veterinary medicine! But she was applying to Tufts, which is in North Grafton and only an hour or so away, and everyone thought that she had a good chance of getting in.
    “I haven’t heard an apology yet,” I said.
    “According to you, what you’re supposed to do about undesired behavior is ignore it. If you don’t reinforce it, it goes away.”
    “The principle doesn’t apply to