Black Ribbon

any good, but she does go. She just doesn’t learn anything. If you ask me, the real problem is her personality. And, Ginny, that’s the thing about Bingo. Everyone knows that. Considering what Eva’s like, Bingo could be a lot worse.”
    “There ought to be a rule about flex leads,” I said. “I don’t mind so much if Bingo is dog-aggressive, but, if he is, he ought to be under control. He should be on a short lead. What happened was that Bingo went flying at Rowdy, and Eva couldn’t stop him. If he’d attacked Rowdy, well, Bingo is a big dog, but there wouldn’t be anything left of him.”
    At the sound of his name, Rowdy quit fooling around with Wiz, Ginny’s kissy-face Lab, and emitted an elaborate series of northern-breed vocalizations that culminated in a strong
    suggestion politely intoned as a question: Ah-roo, woo-woo-woo, woo-woo-woo, roo-roo? Translation: Can we get the hell out of here?
    Even without the translation, Cam and Ginny looked startled.
    “He needs to finish his walk,” I said, “and I have to call home before this meeting. I need to check on my bitch.” Real dog people like Ginny and Cam required no explanation, but I couldn’t think of a good reason to withhold the real one. “Ginny, the card you got? About Merlin. There was a sympathy card in my cabin, too.”
    Their faces fell. “Holly, you should’ve—” Ginny started to say.
    “Nothing’s happened. That’s what’s so weird. The last dog I lost was Vinnie, and that was a month before I got Rowdy. Ginny, could I ask you, the card you got, did it have a sort of watercolor scene? With a couple of trees? And something like, ‘With Sympathy on the Loss of Your Pet.’ In a kind of pale tan envelope.”
    Ginny nodded.
    I said, “I got the same card. I assumed it was some kind of mistake. It probably is. It has to be. Mine wasn’t signed, either.”
    Cam and Ginny both understood: I still had to call home.
     

 
    THE WOMAN in front of me in line for the pay phone wore a blue T-shirt with a picture of a beret-wearing poodle and the proclamation: J’embrassemon chien sur la bouche. But the dog at her feet was a feisty-looking basenji, and she wasn’t kissing him on the mouth, either. She was complaining. “One phone for the whole place isn’t my idea of luxury. Wouldn’t you think they’d have them in the rooms? All these dog people? Everyone’s going to need to call home all the time.” The big lobby of the lodge had had its log walls scrubbed and its floor refinished. The furniture had been arranged with such professional skill that the red-upholstered couches and chairs appeared engaged in happy conversation with the consciously rustic end tables, coffee tables, and magazine racks. The sepia-tinted, blown-up photographs on the walls showed grubby, grinning fishermen holding impressive strings of trout. It seemed just as well that the anglers and their catch were now confined behind glass. Sweat, bug dope, and dead fish would have fought the saccharine reek of floral incense, scented candles, and gift-shop potpourri. A mammoth brown trout mounted on a wooden plaque above the stone fireplace paid odorless tribute to varnish and taxidermy. There wasn’t a fly rod in sight.
    But the renovators had left the original phone booth, a wooden cabinet tucked under the staircase to the second floor. Superman lives. At the moment, though, the hinged door was folded open.
    “Just shove it down his throat and clamp his jaws shut,” a woman was saying, “and then blow on his nose until he sticks his tongue out, and give him a cookie and tell him what a good boy he is.” After she finished, a man in a Big Dog T-shirt interrogated some unfortunate veterinarian about a puddle of perfectly ordinary-sounding vomitus. “Bright yellow and slimy,” the man insisted. “You practically wanted to scramble it.” Then the mouth-kissing basenji woman reminded someone that under no circumstances was Arax ever to be allowed off leash. My turn finally arrived. Rowdy, of course, did not fit in the phone booth. He had to sit just outside. It didn’t matter. I’m not the kind of person who makes the dog say hello.
    In the half day since I’d left Cambridge, my cousin Leah had replaced the message on my answering machine with the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth followed by a cacophony in which Kimi’s woo-wooing vied with the loud barks of her friend Jeffs Border collie. The noise abruptly quit, and Leah’s recorded voice informed