Evil Breeding

best, India, belongs to my vet and my lover, Steve Delaney. India has her UD—Utility Dog obedience title—and is working on her UDX. The X stands for excellent, which is what India already is in all possible respects. She defines her work as taking care of Steve by doing whatever he wants. India is beautiful, intelligent, obedient, well trained, protective of Steve, friendly to almost everyone else, and good with other dogs. Also, as does not go without saying in her breed, she is blessedly free of congenital joint disease. India is such a paragon that she’d be almost intolerable if it weren’t for her infectious interest in everything. If she could speak English, her characteristic utterance would be a buoyant, “I wonder what this is? And this!. And that! Oh, and what’s that over there ?” Like India, this big black male monitored his surroundings. India’s eyes and ears, however, are alert with curiosity. This fellow had a guarded, wary expression. He didn’t growl. His hackles weren’t up. Still, I reminded myself to do everything he expected and nothing he didn’t. My pockets were, as usual, full of dog treats. I didn’t offer him one.
    “I’m Holly Winter,” I told the woman. “I have an appointment with Mr. Motherway.”
    She still said nothing, but nodded pleasantly before picking up a plastic bucket and a spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner and heading up the staircase that rose opposite the door. In her absence, the black dog continued to observe me. Normally, if you were to set me in the middle of the Louvre and turn loose some scruffy, mangy little street dog, I’d be on my hands and knees making friends with the fascinating creature, and I’d be subsequently unable to remember a single art object in that particular gallery or maybe in the entire museum, because the living work would have stolen my rapt attention.
    Now, reluctant to make eye contact with the black shepherd, I studied the hallway and admired the living room, visible through a doorway to my left. The house had the low ceilings and uneven floors of its era. The walls of the long, wide hallway, which stretched to the rear of the house, were covered with what looked like the original flower-patterned paper, miraculously preserved. The paper simply had to be a reproduction of an authentic pattern, didn’t it? Except to install electricity and radiators, no one had done any visible updating since about 1800. All the woodwork, including the banister, doors, door frames, baseboards, and window trim, must have been stripped to the raw wood and freshly painted in these bright and unusual shades of blue, green, yellow, and a soft, rich red. The furnishings were American antiques. On the walls were American primitive paintings, including the kinds of oil portraits done by traveling artists who turned up at the doors of prosperous colonists with painted canvases missing only the particular faces of the family members to be immortalized. Displayed on tables and in cabinets were not the rustic, rusty kitchen implements it’s become fashionable to collect, but pieces of silver and pewter that had certainly been valuable in their own time. On the sparkling floors lay the kinds of Oriental carpets imported for wealthy colonists who wanted their establishments in the New World to look as much as possible like gentlemen’s residences in England. Everything looked scrubbed, dusted, vacuumed, shaken out, ironed, or polished, as needed. I don’t share the popular objection to a house that looks like a museum; the absence of a VCR and a mess of old newspapers in the living room didn’t bother me at all. I was wowed. By comparison with Mrs. Dodge’s Giralda Farms, I reminded myself, this place was practically a hovel. I was still wowed. And if the black male shepherd didn’t ooze charm, he at least refrained from oozing bodily fluids and leaving chew marks on his master’s show-place.
    Footsteps sounded overhead. The feet and long legs of a man began to descend the stairs. Mr. Motherway was tall, lean, and fiercely upright. He had a bullet-shaped head and thick white hair cropped almost to his scalp. His eyes were a deep, bright cobalt blue. His unobtrusively well-tailored gray wool suit struck me as the perfect attire for an American Kennel Club judge on an important assignment. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he stepped forward, extended his hand, and said, “Miss Winter, a pleasure. Jocelyn should have asked you to take a seat.