Black Ribbon

I’ll get this blubber off him, give him some exercise, get him in shape, and... Well, we’ll see, but I think maybe I can finish him.” At my side, Rowdy stirred. “Stay!” I reminded him. To Ginny, I said, “So this business about Eva’s camp... That explains a lot. The sympathy cards, the gruesome stuff, the troublemaking.”
    “The police found a dozen more cards in Eva’s room,” Ginny informed me. “Clippings. Lots of stuff.”
    “So we were right all along. She must’ve arrived here ready to—”
    “To ruin Maxine’s camp,” Ginny said. “To kill the competition.”
     

 
    “I’VE JUST STARTED going through the magazines,” Leah reported. “I haven’t had time.”
     “Leah, you know, I don’t ask you for all that many favors, and—”
    “But I have the Passaic catalog,” she replied smugly. “That’s what I’ve been doing all this time. Or doesn’t that interest you?”
    “Of course it does! But where...?”
    “Faith Barlow.”
    As I’ve mentioned, when I show Rowdy in conformation, I use a professional handler: Faith Barlow. Faith shows a lot. She shows her own dogs and other people’s. She hits so many shows up and down the East Coast and is such an avid collector of show catalogs that as soon as Leah spoke her name, I felt stupid. Leah never tries to make me feel that way. Far from it. She achieves the effect by assuming that I’m as quick as she is. In her place, I’d have started by poking through dozens of recent issues of dog publications. Leah, however, had gone straight to the point, or to one of the points, anyway. She’d still have to look through the magazines, but in getting hold of the show catalog, she’d obtained a complete list of everyone officially connected with the show: the officers of the Passaic Kennel Club, the judges, the stewards, even the vendors and the official show veterinarian, as well as the name of every dog entered, and the names of the dog’s breeder, owner, and handler, too. Leah was about to start her freshman year at Harvard. I wished Harvard luck.
    “Oh, Faith Barlow, of course,” I remarked, as if the need to call Faith had gone without saying. “You went out there? How’d you get there?”
    “Borrowed Steve’s van. Does it ever smell like dogs!”
    “He’s a vet,” I said. “What do you expect it to smell like? Did you take Kimi?”
    Faith has malamutes. With the Alaskan Malamute National Specialty coming up in October, Kimi—in season or out— needed all the exposure to others of her breed that we could provide.
    “Yes,” Leah said. “I fed her chlorophyll and sprayed her with Lust Buster, but the males were interested anyway.”
    “And how’d she do?”
    “Okay.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning I did what Anna Morelli said to do. I put Kimi on a down and—”
    “Yeah, well, Anna Morelli’s one of the people we’re going up against, you know, and Tundra is so good with other animals—”
    As a reminder to myself that an exceptionally brilliant and intense malamute can, in fact, be trained to behave herself in the presence of other animals, I’d placed a framed photograph of Anna and Tundra on the windowsill directly in front of my computer, where I had to look at it every time I sat down to work. Also present in the picture was, of all things, a ferret, which lay spread out on Tundra’s neck, its head peering over the top of hers. In case you know anything about malamutes, I should add that, remarkably enough, the ferret was alive and that, rather than attempting to kill it, Tundra was making intelligent and peaceful eye contact with the camera. Anna was smiling joyfully. And for good reason.
    “Stop!” Leah demanded. “I know all about the ferret! I’ve seen the picture. And if you expect me to go out and get some ferret so that Kimi can learn... Holly, it’s a malamute specialty! There aren’t exactly going to be a lot of ferrets—”
    “It’s important to proof against all possible contingencies,” I said blandly.
    “So are you interested in this catalog, or would you rather nag me—”
    “Leah, I’m sorry. What have you found?” I rested a little notebook on a shelf under the pay phone and prepared to
    scribble.
    “Okay. Um, Mrs. Donald Abbott judged Novice A and Open B.”
    “You have the catalog there? Where are you in it? At the beginning?”
    “Yes. Where it lists the rings. You want me to read it to
    you?”
    “Yes. Just the relevant parts, not everything.”
    “Okay.