Animal Appetite

dog. Kimi replied by hopping up. “Good girl! Anything I ought to know? Any issues about grooming?” She sounded oddly like Rita: issues!
    “Not really.”
    Tracy slowly and gently picked up one of Kimi’s front feet.
    “Drew,” I said abruptly. “Andrew?”
    Holding Kimi’s foot, Tracy deftly clipped nails. “Yeah.”
    “I thought it might be Andrews." I dragged out the s. “Nice kid.” As soon as the clippers were safely away from Kimi’s foot, I added, “He looks exactly like Jack.”
    Tracy dropped the clippers into an open drawer attached to the table. Resting one hand on Kimi’s back, as if claiming ownership, she growled, “Who the hell sent you here?” If I’d suddenly punched Tracy in the stomach, she wouldn’t have looked more angry or sounded more menacing than she did now.
    “No one sent me. I’m all on my own. I started to write a story about Jack Andrews. I’m a dog writer. I heard about his murder and the connection with his dog.”
    “There was no connection,” Tracy snapped.
    “Yes, there was. When Jack’s body was found, Chip was tethered to his desk.”
    “Why?”
    “Because Jack wasn’t alone. Therefore, murder. Not suicide.”
    Speaking more to herself than to me, Tracy said vehemently, “Jack would never have killed himself. Never.”
    “I didn’t know him. I wish I had. I feel... Tracy, I’m not here to make trouble. I write for Dog’s Life. I started working on what was supposed to be a little story, and then... Tracy, among other things, I grew up with goldens. I used to show them. My mother was a breeder. I did a lot of competition obedience.”
    Tracy’s eyes darted to Kimi. A hint of the elfin smile appeared. Her voice, however, carried a note of hostility. “But you weren’t happy with your scores, so you switched to malamutes?”
    Among the top obedience handlers these days, it’s fashionable to show off by switching from the so-called traditional obedience breeds, meaning the good ones— the golden retriever, the Border collie—to what are supposed to be the challenges of whippets or Afghan hounds. Hah! I am not impressed. Admittedly, whippets and the Afghan hounds are terrible obedience dogs, but for unparalleled thumb-your-nose-at-the-handler disobedience, the Alaskan malamute can’t be beat.
    “On the contrary,” I said. “My last golden was so perfect that... Anyway, I never meant to get a malamute. I ended up with one. Rowdy. I kept him. He has his C.D.X. He’s working in Utility. I have no complaints.”
    “I know who you are.” Tracy spoke in approximately the tone I’d use if I suddenly realized I was confronting Charles Manson. “I read your column. You write about your dogs.”
    “Yes,” I admitted. “That was the other reason I, uh, got involved in the story about Jack. Because of Winter. His middle name.”
    “Are you...?”
    “No relation. It’s a common name. But goldens, the name, some other, uh, coincidences. I also happened to be working on a story about Hannah Duston. Jack Andrews came from Haverhill. My other dog, Rowdy, was born there. In Bradford. You used to groom for his breeder. Janet Switzer?”
    In the manner of a real dog person, instead of saying what a nice person Janet was or “Oh, I remember Janet. How is she?” or something else normal, Tracy said, “Beautiful dogs. Good temperaments.”
    You can probably guess the rest. Having driven all the way from Cambridge to Ellsworth to find the truth about Jack’s secret life as well as his murder, and having unexpectedly discovered that his hidden life in what I’d assumed to be show dogs had produced a human son, I naturally had to go out to the car to get Rowdy so that Tracy could see the descendant of the dogs she’d once groomed for Janet. As will be obvious to anyone in dogs, Tracy then had to drag out her old brag books and show me pictures of the champions she’d finished years ago. About thirty minutes into the uninterrupted dog talk, she suddenly asked, “Do you really want Kimi groomed?”
    “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
    As promised, Tracy did an excellent job, and while she brushed and lathered and rinsed and dried and brushed, we kept chatting and hollering over the rush of water and the roar of the dryer about Janet Switzer, Violet Wish, my late mother, my infamous father, dozens of people in goldens she’d known years before, and, of course, dogs and more dogs. When Kimi’s coat was finally dry and stood off her body just the way