Animal Appetite

lugubriously—“was a woman who understood dogs.”
    I ignored the combined eulogy and lecture that followed. At the back of a show catalog, I should mention, is an index of exhibitors, together with their addresses. “Do you have the catalogs there? Would you please look up Tracy Littlefield’s address?”
    “Georgetown,” he growled, as if it, too, had let him down by failing to understand dogs.
    “Georgetown, Maine?”
    “Georgetown, Massachusetts,” he replied in disgust. “Never heard of the damn place.” My father is almost as loyal to the state of Maine as he is to dogs. He takes particular offense at innocent cities like Portland, Oregon, and Augusta, Georgia, which he evidently suspects of an attempt at geographic social climbing that consists of a futile effort to pass themselves off as their betters.
    “It’s near Haverhill,” I said, more to myself than to my father. “It’s right next to Bradford.” I can never shake the irrational impulse to try to please my father. “Bradford,” I reminded him, “is Rowdy’s birthplace.” When I finally got Buck off the phone, I called Information. There was no listing in Georgetown for Tracy Littlefield. Armed with Tracy’s last name, I called Janet Switzer, who said, “Oh, Tracy Littlefield! The groomer! Whatever happened to her?”
    “I have no idea. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
    “I used to see her at shows. She lived in Georgetown. She worked at the library.”
    “I thought you said she was a groomer.”
    “She was. She had goldens.”
    “Sound,” I said. “But not typey.” It takes me a day or two to recover from a conversation with my father. “Ignore that. That’s what my father thinks. Actually, I saw a picture of one of her dogs, a head study. Violet Wish did it. He had a very typey head.”
    Violet, as you know, is the Bachrach of show dogs. I didn’t have to explain who she was.
    “Violet did that head study of Denny,” Janet said. Denali: Rowdy’s late sire. Janet knew that I knew which head study she meant.
    “I know.”
    “You ought to have Violet do one of Rowdy.”
    “And Kimi,” I said. “If I ever have the money, I will.” Let me point out that it was neither my fault nor Janet’s that we’d strayed from the subject of Tracy Littlefield. Dogs possess a magnetic power over the conversation of dog people: No matter how hard we fight to stay on another topic, we get drawn back. Triumphing over the almost overwhelming impulse to discourse at length on the prospect of Violet Wish canine portraits, I said abruptly, before the dogs won out, “So Tracy Littlefield worked at the Georgetown Library?”
    “No—Haverhill. The Haverhill Public Library. I used to see her there all the time. She checked books in and out. I don’t think she was a professional librarian. When I needed help with interlibrary loans, I had to ask someone else.” Like a lot of other people with Northern breeds, Janet had undoubtedly been borrowing arcane books about polar expeditions and the native peoples of the Arctic. Corgi fanciers track down books about Wales. If you love your puli or your Kuvasz, you’re bound to get curious about Hungary. Virtually all dog fanciers feel this compulsion to learn about the breed’s origins, and even if we have the money to buy the rare books that we increasingly crave, we sometimes can’t find them. Consequently, we rely on interlibrary loans. “Tracy groomed on the side,” Janet continued.
    “She had a shop?”
    “No, she just used her own grooming area at home, in her laundry room. She rented a little house in Georgetown, not too far from here. The basement had one of those big old set tubs, and she had a grooming table and her own dryers. It was kind of makeshift, but she did a good job. I used her when I didn’t feel like grooming. I trusted her with the dogs.”
    So what’s not to trust about a dog groomer? Most of the time, nothing. Almost all groomers become groomers in the first place because they like dogs. When the owners aren’t around, however, a few groomers handle the dogs roughly.
    “The dogs were crazy about Tracy,” Janet added. “She really did love dogs.”
    “She was friends with a guy named Jack Andrews,” I said. “They co-owned some goldens. She handled his dogs. Did you ever meet him?”
    “Not that I know of. I might’ve seen him. Tracy wasn’t really a friend of mine. She was kind of quiet. Shy. I just used to see her around. But she was a