Bloodlines

Don’t trust that young woman, Holly! Don’t trust her!”
     

23
     

     
    A quick trip to the phone book shelves of the Cambridge Public Library gave me Walter Simms’s address— or what there was to it: Old County Lane, Afton. Back home again, I set to work preparing to present myself to the Simmses as a purveyor of a line of flea control products. By now Pd had enough of masquerading as a puppy buyer, and I wasn’t sure that Simms and his sister did direct sales, anyway. The role of social worker or humane society representative would have been plausible, of course, but my good bullet-proof vest was at the cleaner’s, and the spare isn’t fit to wear in public. The sales rep of a dog chow company would have been worth a try, I guess, but I picked flea control products because I wanted something that would assuredly be of no great interest to a puppy mill operator. On second thought, maybe dog food would have done as well.
    A battered storage cabinet in the basement yielded two pump spray bottles of flea and tick killer, a canister of powder, a bottle of insecticidal shampoo, another of kennel and yard spray, and two unopened packages containing flea and tick collars, virtually the full line of a company called Flee-B-Gon that may well have Flee-B-Gon out of business by now. Its products are—or were —perfectly natural, organic, gentle, and useless, as I’d discovered the previous August when every flea in Cambridge seemed to have landed on my two dogs. Steve had warned me that vitamin E and coconut oil would be ineffective against the megainfestation, but he’d also assured me that they were harmless. If Walter or Cheryl Simms took me up on the offer of a free sample—assuming I got that far—at least the dogs wouldn’t end up in worse shape than they already were.
    Back upstairs, I ran a damp sponge over the Flee-B-Gon containers, and when they looked practically new, I packed them neatly into a briefcase that ordinarily held nothing except loathsome memories of a job I once held in a place suffering from what I believe is called “sick-building syndrome,” which is to say that no dogs were allowed.
    I didn’t bother changing into anything special. I wasn’t sure what a Flee-B-Gon rep looked like, and I was willing to bet that Walter and Cheryl Simms weren’t experts on pest-control couture, either. Besides, the thermometer outside my kitchen window read forty-one, and what should have been falling as snow was pelting down as premature spring rain. I wore a yellow slicker and a pair of the world’s only genuinely waterproof boots, my yellow L.L. Bean Wellingtons. Getting your first puppy? You can manage without the canine playpen, the X-pen, and the Wee-Wee Pads. It’s even possible to raise a dog without a crate. But unless you live in the Sahara, you’re going to walk the pup rain or shine, so invest in L.L. Bean Wellies, the best two-footed friend a dog walker ever had.
    According to the atlas, Afton was beyond Route 495, Boston’s outer beltway, farther from Cambridge than I’d thought. Rowdy and Kimi would be bored at borne, and I’d miss their company, but their health was more important than my comfort. If by chance I got into the puppy mill, I’d leave with my boots and maybe my bands and my slicker contaminated by the multitude of the parasites and diseases that flourish in filth. Infection is a problem among the largely pampered entrants in a dog show. Some kennels maintain isolation areas where dogs live in quarantine after they return from shows. To avoid carrying diseases into their own kennels, a few extraordinarily careful people reserve one pair of shoes exclusively for shows. I don’t own show shoes that never touch home ground, but I always keep Rowdy and Kimi up on their shots, I have regular checks for parasites, and I don’t expose them to puppy mills. The shoes I’d worn at Bill Coakley’s and at Your Local Breeder had already been soaked in chlorine bleach.
    I spread the dogs’ fake-sheepskin pallets on the kitchen floor, tuned the radio to a talk station, hugged the dogs, told them to be good, and set out. Then I headed out of Cambridge on Route 2. I eventually cut west and drove through the bleak, sodden landscape for what felt like hours.
    My mental image of the fat-bellied Walter Simms had given way to the reality of the lean guy at Rinehart’s, but I’d somehow retained my original vision of his sprawling midwestern farm. Old County Lane turned out