Breathless

what-ifs.”
    “Right now I just want to experience them,” Grady said. “If I think too much about what they might be, that’s going to color how I interpret their behavior.”
    Watching the animals drink, Merlin seemed to strike a proud pose, as if they were good students to whom he had successfully imparted the right technique for drinking from a bowl.
    “Anyway,” Cammy said, “you can’t know for sure there’s nothing scary about them.”
    “There’s nothing scary about them,” he insisted.
    “Not now, they’re as cute as Muppets now, but maybe later when the lights are off and you’re asleep, that’s when they reveal their true grotesque form.”
    “You don’t really believe that’s a possibility.”
    “No. It’s a what-if, but it’s a ridiculous what-if.”
    “Anyway, they’re a lot cuter than Muppets,” he said. “Some Muppets creep me out. Nothing about these two creeps me out.”
    “Muppets creep you out? Freud would find that interesting.”
    “Not all Muppets creep me out. Just a few.”
    “Surely not Kermit.”
    “Of course not Kermit. But Big Bird’s a freak.”
    “He’s a freak?”
    “A total freak.”
    As predictably steady, reliable, and self-contained as Grady might be, his conversation could take unpredictable deadpan turns. Cammy liked that. He was smart and amusing, but he was safe.
    “Big Bird,” she said. “Is that why you don’t have a TV?”
    “It’s one of the reasons.”
    Riddle and then Puzzle finished drinking. They sat up on their haunches like a couple of giant prairie dogs, folded their hands on their bellies, and regarded Grady with expectation.
    “Maybe they’re hungry,” Cammy suggested.
    “They already ate three chicken breasts. And as far as I know, they ate the pan, too.”
    “You don’t know these guys are the chicken thieves. There might be another factor—whoever went in your workshop, the garage, whoever switched on the lights.”
    “See, this is why I make furniture.”
    “What’s furniture got to do with it?”
    “When I make furniture, I don’t have to think. My hands do all the thinking for me.”
    “Even if Puzzle and Riddle
did
eat the chicken,” Cammy said, “maybe that’s the only thing they’ve had to eat all day. You don’t want to send them to bed hungry.”
    “Because they might eat me alive in the middle of the night? Problem is, I don’t have any more chicken.”
    “Give them some of Merlin’s kibble, see if they like it.”
    “If I pour bowls of kibble for them, I’ll have to give Merlin some, and he’s already had all he should have for one day.”
    “Merlin isn’t fat. You’d have to dole out kibble with a shovel to overfeed him. Give him a bowl, let him celebrate his new friends.”
    “They
do
look like they expect something. Maybe you’re right, maybe they’re hungry.”
    He kept forty pounds of Science Diet in the pantry—twenty pounds in a large aluminum can with an airtight lid, and an unopened twenty-pound backup bag. He put a large scoopful in Merlin’s food bowl and a smaller serving in each of two cereal bowls.
    The wolfhound was trained to sit in front of his bowl and wait for permission to eat. The word
okay
released him to his meal.
    Puzzle and Riddle studied Merlin and mimicked him, sitting at their bowls. When the dog ate, the two tasted their kibble, found it acceptable, and chowed down.
    Needing to go home and get to work with the memory stick from Grady’s camera, still too enchanted to leave, Cammy watched the three eat. “In his way, Merlin’s as wonderful and mysterious as they are.”
    Grady seemed surprised. “I was thinking the same thing.”
    After his return to the mountains, near the end of his first year, Grady had told Cammy that he’d rediscovered the mystery of the ordinary. He said, if you allowed yourself to be enchanted by the beauty to be seen in even ordinary things, then all things proved to be extraordinary. Shortly thereafter, she gave Merlin to him, a puppy as large as some grown dogs, rough-coated, shaggy-browed, and as magical as the magician for whom he had been named.
    Cammy said, “You know High Meadows Farm?”
    “That’s the Vironi place, they raise Thoroughbreds?”
    “Yeah. Something happened at High Meadows this afternoon, right before twilight.”
    She told him about the strange condition of the horses and the other animals.
    “Diagnosis?” he asked.
    “I was working on it when you called me out here. Now I don’t think there