Bloodlines

ethical breeder. According to any standard pet shop contract, of course, under absolutely no circumstances do you ever get your money back.
    Lois gave me my coffee. I will not describe the containers from which I spooned sugar and poured heavy cream. Suffice it to say they both had tails. “The one that’s involved is from He’ll Have to Go and Family Tradition,” I said.
    “Jim and Hank,” said Lois, heaving herself into a seat. “Funny name for a bitch, but, yeah, that’s the one. I’ve been on this since yesterday morning. I’ve been too busy to do the follow-ups I should’ve been doing all along, so I’ve been getting caught up. But I’ll tell you, this is a heavy price to pay for being busy, if you ask me.” A thin layer of moisture coated Lois’s blunt face. Her skin and eyes were tinged with gray.
    “So you’ve already tracked down...?”
    “Well, I started with the summer before last, a year and a half ago, because I always screen my buyers, always, but that was the time I might’ve got taken, because I had a lot of dogs at the time, and I bred three litters that summer.” Her little eyes scanned my face. “And if what you’re thinking is that three litters is too many, you’re wrong, because I’ll tell you, those dogs are doing very, very well.”
    Lois went on to tell me about three dogs who’d already finished—finished their breed championships— and some others who had their first majors—major wins —and so forth and so on. The record was impressive, especially for such young dogs, all under two years old. I kept nodding and murmuring approval, but all the while I was thinking of Icekist Sissy. Ending up as a brood bitch in a puppy mill is no one’s idea of “doing very, very well.”
    Before long, I got tired of listening. Also, of course I was impatient to hear what Lois had discovered. “About Icekist Sissy,” I said. “What did you find out?”
    “Yuppie couple,” she said. “They called. Ames, their name was. I told them to come see the puppies, and they did, and they seemed, I don’t know, okay. They both did some computer stuff, so they were gone all day, but they had a fenced yard. And besides that, they’d already put up a kennel. So they sounded all right.”
    Lots of breeders, including Betty Burley, who’s supercareful about buyers, share that strong bias in favor of any potential puppy buyer whose yard is fenced. I’m not so sure. What does a fenced yard really guarantee except the presence of a handy place to neglect the dog?
    “They didn’t know anything,” Lois added, meaning, of course, anything about malamutes, “but they seemed all right. So I sold them a bitch from the third litter. And they signed a contract.”
    “And then?”
    “And what I know now—I talked to him yesterday —is that they both lost their jobs, cutbacks, first her, then him. They were living in Acton, but the only job he could find was in Hartford, Connecticut, so they had to move, and they rented an apartment. And that’s when they sold the puppy.”
    “Without calling you?”
    “Well, according to him, they tried, and they couldn’t reach me, but you can take that with a grain of salt. They put the contract in a file drawer and forgot about it, if you ask me, even though this was only maybe two months after they bought the puppy. So, anyway, they put an ad in one of these little freebie papers, and they sold her.”
    “To a guy named Walter Simms,” I said confidently.
    Lois corrected me. “Rinehart. Joe Rinehart.”
    “Oh,” I said. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
    “He’s supposed to live in Burlington—Massachusetts, not Vermont—and I must’ve called twenty times, but all I get’s an answering machine.”
    Burlington is yet another jewel on Greater Boston’s now-tarnished high-tech necklace, namely, Route 128.
    “Did you get an address?”
    “I’ve got it here somewhere,” Lois said. While she shuffled through a pile of puppy contracts, notes, and bills, I fumed. Burlington was about a half hour from Lois’s house. What was she doing just sitting here? Selling puppies, I thought.
    “Here it is,” Lois said, handing me a slip of paper.
    Beneath the face of a happy-looking malamute, Lois had scrawled the name Joe Rinehart, a phone number, and an address: 84 Sherwood Lane, Burlington.
    She reached for a white Trimline phone that sat on top of a stack of Malamute Quarterly s on the table. “I’ll give him