Black Ribbon

may be a waste of time,” I warned Leah.
    I hung up with the intention of going straight to my cabin. But I got waylaid before I’d even left the main lodge and ended up back in the dining room, where Maxine was making an announcement to as many campers as she’d been able to gather.
    “Purely as a formality,” she was chirping, “Officer Varney has decided to call in the State Police, which will, I’m told,
    mean a rather large number of people descending on us, and something called a Crime Lab that’s apparently a van of some kind, but the point is, as I’ve explained to Wayne—to Officer Varney, that is—that we will go ahead with our plans as much as we possibly can in the face of this terrible, terrible tragedy,  which is, and I’m sure you’ll all agree, exactly what Eva would have wanted us to do.”
    Reluctant to reenter the dining room, I’d stationed myself against a wall just inside the door. Next to me, Myrna was whispering loudly to Marie: “Can’t you just hear Eva if it’d been someone else? If they’d canceled agility so they could get the body out, she’d’ve been screaming for a refund for the time she’d missed.”
    “Myrna, for God’s sake,” Marie murmured. “She’s dead, all right?” She looked ill.
    “Yeah, well,” Myrna replied, “if it’d been someone else, she’d’ve been the first person to throw a shit fit.” After a brief pause, she added, “So who do you think finally had the guts?” With genuine shock, Marie cried out, “Myrna, really!” Undaunted, Myrna replied, “ ‘Really’ yourself. I wonder if it was her dog. It could’ve been, you know. I mean, we just had to put up with her at shows and stuff; poor old Bingo had to live with her, and if that wouldn’t drive anyone to murder, I don’t know what would. It’s a miracle he didn’t—”
    “Oh, honestly,” Marie said.
    “Honestly! Think about it. She must’ve had him off lead, right? Why not? In the middle of the night? No one around?
    So she leaves him on a sit-stay or a down-stay, and she goes crawling under the A-frame, and what’s he going to do? Break, right? Same as ever. So there she is, under the A-frame, and he breaks, and as soon as he goes charging up on it, the whole thing comes crashing down on her! And if that’s not how it happened, then you tell me—”
    “But not on purpose!” Marie countered fiercely. “Yeah, maybe Bingo did go and jump on the A-frame, except that
    those things weigh a ton, and it could’ve just slipped, but even if he... Myrna, even if he landed on it, it was just an accident! He didn’t murder her! Honestly, what an awful thing to say about a dog!”
    With a triumphant smirk, Myrna shot back: “Yeah, well, so if he’s innocent, how come he took off, then? Huh? You see? He murdered her, and then he fled the scene of the crime.”
    “You know, Myrna, it’s really not funny.” Marie’s eyes were blazing.
    “So if he’s not, uh, what do you call it, fleeing the long arm of the law, then where is he?” Myrna demanded.
    “Where any other dog would be,” Marie said. “He got loose, and he took off. For God’s sake! He probably just took off after a bitch in season.”
    Marie’s frivolous-sounding guess eventually proved correct. The myths of the fancy, of course, abound in stories of death-denying canine devotion to deceased masters. According to legend, for instance, and as far as I know, according to fact as well, for nine years after the death in 1925 of Professor Eisaburo Ueno of Tokyo University, his loyal Akita, Hachiko, went daily to the railway station to meet the train of a man whose terrestrial commuting days were over. Instead of meeting trains, Hachiko might have staged a series of howling concerts at his master’s grave. Vocal gifts failing him, he could always have refused to taste a morsel of food offered by a hand other than his master’s, thus hastening his celestial reunion with the professor. When you think about it, he had a lot of options. What’s clear, though, is that if the sport of dog agility had existed in 1925, and if Professor Ueno, having taken it up, had had the bad luck to perish under one of the obstacles, the faithful Hachiko would have stuck around.
    Hachiko was the stuff of legends. Bingo was not. A healthy, young, hormone-driven male, he was discovered in the yard of a neat little white house near the center of Rangeley, the home of a golden retriever in her first heat. According to Ginny,