Black Ribbon

senseless reasons, the most imposing of which, literally and figuratively, was her splendid and pacific mastiff pup, Cash. Halo effect: shining Cash illuminates Maxine; radiant Elsa glorifies Eric. Were Chesapeake Bay retrievers granted judging privileges, Elsa, who loved swimming even more than Eric did, would never have compromised the position to which the AKC had elevated her, but would have picked her winners strictly on the basis of their merits. An honest dog deserves an honest owner. Cash. Max hadn’t even chosen the mastiffs name. Even so, it now made me squirm.
    “Maxine,” Cam had said as we were leaving the dining room, “has an unfortunate tendency to get herself in trouble over money.”
    “With puppy buyers?” I’d asked. It’s easy to do, and I’d been eager to overlook misunderstandings about refundable deposits, stud rights, or complex co-ownership agreements. After all, my editor, Bonnie, vouched for Maxine; the two were old friends. Besides, Max was a real dog person, and if you can’t trust your own, you can’t trust anyone.
    “With everyone,” Cam had said. “This CGC thing is typical, charging twenty dollars because the pet people are a captive audience, and they don’t know better. But what she doesn’t take into account is that they’re going to find out because we’re going to tell them, and they’re not going to like it, and the whole thing’s going to backfire. And then this stingy lunch after all the hype about gourmet food. Plus the agility people—”
    “What—?”
    “The CGC testing’s in the agility area, so they have to move all the obstacles out of the way. They have to shift them around all the time, anyway, so the dogs don’t just run through the same pattern all the time, but they don’t normally have to drag everything out of the way. And those things are heavy! The A-frame weighs a ton, and the dogwalk isn’t all that easy to move. But the main thing is that Max has drafted the agility people to serve as evaluators.”
    Canine Good Citizen test evaluators decide whether the dog passes or fails an exercise. Any reasonable person who knows anything about dogs is allowed to be an evaluator, but the task ordinarily belongs to members of the organization sponsoring the test, people who want to make the event a success. It does not usually fall on employees who would otherwise have had time off.
    “Why?” I’d asked. “Why the agility people?”
    “That’s what they want to know. Apparendy, it wasn’t part of their agreement. Maxine just sort of sprang it on them: ‘And guess what else you get to do!’ That kind of thing.”
    ‘‘Surprise!Extra work.’ “Yes.”
    “That’s stupid, at least if Maxine wants them back again next year.”
    “Oh, they won’t be back, anyway,” Cam had said. “They’re opening their own agility camp. Don’t mention it. Maxine doesn’t know. Anyway, what’s sad is that it’s all so unnecessary, and as usual, Maxine doesn’t have any idea that she’s doing anything wrong. About anything. The twenty dollars, any of it. Probably she thinks it’s a favor to offer the CGC thing, and I’ll bet anything she has some rationale for why it costs so much. It’s just like that old business with the club funds.”
    By persuading Cam that I’d never heard anything about any club funds, I learned another thing I’d have preferred not to know. Years ago, it seemed, when Maxine McGuire had been the treasurer of what I’ll call the Unnamed Kennel Club, she’d been in charge of a certain Special Fund established for a certain Good Purpose that I shall not specify except to say that said Good Purpose was clearly not to offer an alarming number of no-interest loans to the club treasurer, loans that she was eventually discovered to have taken out and had somehow neglected to repay. And then? Should you have the misfortune to dwell outside the world of purebred dogs, perhaps you will be astonished to learn that instead of venting their collective outrage by promptly dragging Max into court and kicking her out of the club, the members of the Unnamed K.C. viewed Max’s behavior as an unfortunate accident, like a puddle left by a puppy that should never have been allowed full run of the house. Incredible? Not at all. Maxine hadn’t harmed a dog or broken an AKC rule. Since she’d done nothing unforgivable, the fancy forgave her. She resigned as treasurer, but she was still one of us. Freemasonry, I suspect, handles such