Bloodlines

malamute. Maybe he still does. Anyway, if Robin Williams happens to have been your first husband’s college roommate or something, and if you run into him, could you mention AMPL? The Alaskan Malamute Protection League. Just sort of work it into the conversation, huh? Box 170, Cedar Crest, New Mexico, 87008. Oh, and tell him that his donation won’t go to reclaim a rescue dog like Missy, lost by someone who found her inconvenient, someone who had better things to do.... In fact, if you think he can handle it, tell him the brutal truth: Rescue shouldn’t have to mean the painless dignity of a needle instead of the mass horror of a decompression chamber, but sometimes that’s what it comes down to.
    So Missy’s ransom, Coakley’s motivation, was my responsibility. I’d lost Missy. I’d pay to get her back. Also, I kept remembering Kevin’s repeated insistence that Puppy Luv used local suppliers. I’d been assuming that Missy had come from the Midwest or Pennsylvania and that the hog-faced, fat-bellied Walter Simms had 1 represented himself as legitimate and persuaded Lois Metzler to ship him a puppy. In fact, I’d been especially ready to believe that that’s what had happened because of a story I’d recently heard from another local malamute breeder, Ginny Pawson. Seven or eight years ago, a pleasant-sounding woman in Iowa had talked Ginny into shipping her a bitch. A month later, though, Ginny spotted a malamute puppy in a pet shop and managed to get a look at the papers. The breeder shown on those papers was the same woman who’d just bought Ginny’s bitch. Ginny paid twice the purchase price to buy back that puppy, but she considered herself fortunate. I’d been assuming that Lois Metzler’s story was what Ginny’s would have been without the intervention of coincidence. Also, of course, I’d been eager to keep the horror of puppy mills as geographically remote as possible.
    Local dogs, Kevin had insisted. Not from Kansas, not from the airport. Local. Puppy Luv’s ad: local breeders. By Diane Sweet’s standards, Bill Coakley was a local breeder; by mine, he was a puppy mill operator who’d eliminated the broker and the pet shop by doing direct sales. Your Local Breeder. Janice Coakley and Diane Sweet were sisters. Bill Coakley had been Diane Sweet’s brother-in-law. Eight years ago, Ginny Pawson had been talked into shipping a bitch to Iowa. Eight years ago, almost all breeders were more innocent and trusting than they are now. I didn’t know the birth date of Missy’s dam, Icekist Sissy, but I was willing to bet that Lois Metzler hadn’t sold her any eight years ago. I could find Icekist Sissy’s age by consulting the malamute studbook, but it didn’t really matter. The point was that Lois had sold Icekist Sissy recently enough to have been wary about shipping a puppy to an unknown buyer in a distant part of the country. Yes, it could have happened. But the chances were good that the buyer had been local. The word kept running through my head: local, local.
    Almost on impulse, I called Gloria Loss, whose voice was thick with sleep. When she heard my name, the grogginess turned to guilt. “Did it snow? Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
    “No, it didn’t... Gloria, I’ve, uh, sort of been rethinking things.”
    “I’m really, really—”
    “I’ve got another plan,” I said. “There’s something I want you to do, instead of the shoveling. It’s more... it’s sort of more connected to your original purpose. Only this could actually do some good. All it is, is... all I want you to do is to collect some information. It’s just a matter of keeping your eyes and ears open. What I want you to do is apply for a job. If you don’t get hired, that’s it. We’ll... I’ll take it from there. But if you do, we have to agree right now that all you do is look and listen. You don’t actually do anything. Okay? And you don’t, uh, express your own opinions. You just give me the information, and then I worry about what to do about it. If anything.”
    Gloria startled me. “Is this a job at a pet shop?”
    “Yes,” I said. Then a little chagrined at having been second-guessed, I added, “More or less.”
    “I thought from the way you... the way you talked about them.” Her voice took on that ghastly tone of adolescent admiration. “I could tell that you had strong feelings about them. You sounded really committed.”
    I felt myself cringe. I’m so committed that I’d never