All Shots

of the Labrador retriever, the pointer, and lots of other breeds and mixes. The word is used mainly to differentiate between breeds or varieties characterized by distinctive coats. Lassie is a rough collie as opposed to a smooth collie. Nick and Nora’s engaging Asta in the old Thin Man movies is a wire fox terrier rather than a smooth fox terrier like this one. So, my eye went first to the charming dog, who was, I noted with relief, on leash. After that, I noticed the woman’s ever so slightly rolling, shuffling gait, which struck me as unusual in someone walking as quickly as she was. Belatedly, I recognized Mellie, who, of course, did dog walking.
    As I was on the verge of calling out to her, Miss Blue beat me to it by bursting into peals of woo-woo-woo, ah woo, ah woo-woo-woo-woo-woo. Simultaneously, Mellie astonished me by shouting in that hoarse voice of hers while breaking into a run and barreling straight toward me—or, as it turned out, toward Miss Blue.
    “Strike!” Mellie hollered. “Strike!”
    Miss Blue’s manners deserted her. She hit the end of her leash, and I went flying after her.
    My only part in the reunion, as it obviously was, consisted of my leading Mellie’s little client, the fox terrier, out of the way. In ecstasy, Miss Blue flung herself to the grass, rolled over, tucked in her paws, and eyed Mellie with the worshipful gaze that malamutes reserve for their objects of highest adoration, which is to say, anyone and everyone who has ever given them anything to eat. Mellie, for her part, got down on the damp ground, rubbed Miss Blue’s underbelly, stood up, clapped her hands softly together, and, having lured Miss Blue to her feet, took the dog’s big head gently in her hands and said, “I prayed to the Virgin every day for you. All the time, I lit candles. I was so...” Mellie choked up. Tears ran down her face.
    I’m ashamed to admit that one of my first feelings was anger. I’d been looking for a Siberian husky. That’s what I’d been told to look for, and I’d done exactly what I’d been asked to do. Why hadn’t anyone...? Then my anger turned inward. I should have known! All too clearly, I remembered Mellie’s response when she’d first seen Rowdy: she’d said that Strike looked like Rowdy. But different, she’d added. Of course she’d looked different! She was smaller than Rowdy, a female, one with a blue coat and eyes lighter than Rowdy’s near-black. So what? Over and over, I’d had my malamutes admired by people who said, “Beautiful huskies!” When Steve and I hiked with the dogs in Acadia National Park, we made a game of counting the number of times the malamutes were called huskies. But there’d been reasons for what now felt like my stupidity. In the American Kennel Club rankings, the Siberian husky was the twenty-fifth most popular breed, and the Alaskan malamute was the fifty-eighth; there were a lot more Siberians than there were malamutes. What’s more, Siberians were the Houdinis of purebred dogdom, and when they escaped, they ran like crazy, fast and far away. In contrast, the typical malamute who got out of a fenced yard went straight to the nearest door to the house. Typical? What did that mean? Incredible though it seemed to me, there existed picky-eater malamutes and malamutes with almost no interest in food. As to escapism, malamutes did get loose and did get lost, and I’d heard of malamutes who not only tunneled under fences but who climbed chain link. Damn it! Strike had gone under Mellie’s fence. She’d been seen heading for the back of Dr. Ho’s house. I should have guessed.
    I’d like to report that the moment I finally put one dog and one dog together to get one dog, everything else fell neatly into place. It did not. On the contrary, isolated fragments dropped in a jumble. Mellie’s lost husky. The photo of the blue malamute found among the murder victim’s belongings. The traces of dog hair also found there. The “girl,” as Mellie had said, who’d left Strike with her: the murdered woman, the woman who’d put my name, my address, and my phone number on... her own malamute. Or on someone else’s? On this blue malamute, the same dog Mellie had lost, the same one I’d found.
    “Go home with Mellie,” I heard. “Now you get to come home with me.”
    Not a chance.
    Had Mellie, too, made the connection between the murder victim and the woman who’d left Strike with her? Mellie did not make connections easily, I thought.