Evil Breeding

attacker approached, Rowdy would warn me, wouldn’t he? Not deliberately, I thought. On the contrary, Rowdy would prepare himself to extend his usual happy greeting. On the other hand, he wouldn’t just sit there and let someone garrote me. He stands twenty-five inches at the withers and weighs close to ninety pounds. The power of his breed is even greater than the size would suggest. I comforted myself with the memory that in his youth, Tazs, my friend Delores’s somersaulting malamute, had often pulled forty times his own weight. Forty times! Tazs, the famous Pulling Machine, had a Working Weight Pull Dog Excellent title and a history of weight-pull triumphs that Rowdy lacked. But the two dogs weighed the same! And Rowdy loved me as devotedly as Tazs loved Delores, which is to say with a concentrated adoration equal to a million times his own weight. I felt certain that Rowdy would bring a physical attack to an immediate, violent halt. I didn’t want to see Superdog in action, though. In particular, I didn’t want to see bullets penetrate his chest instead of bouncing off.
    As if to shield Rowdy, I shortened his leash and forced my way ahead of him. The guard’s corpse lay near an intersection of roads. At a guess, it wouldn’t have been left where Motherway and the tattooed man would cross it on their return route. From where I stood, with my back toward Coolidge Avenue, the body was on the left. Therefore, I should head to the right. And at another guess, the men had taken Jocelyn to the Gardner vault, which I was quite sure was somewhere to my right. Mary Baker Eddy’s monument, readily visible in the daytime from Coolidge Avenue, was definitely to my right. It was the size of a building and was made of pale stone; even at night, it would be impossible to miss. If I reached it, I’d know I’d gone too far. The Gardner vault was deeper into the cemetery than the Eddy Memorial. I’d need to bear right and cut toward the interior of Mount Auburn. I’d also need to leave the paved roads. The Gardner vault, the family crypt, sat on the shores of a little artificial lake in what might have been a natural valley. Some sort of path ran near the lakeshore, but I was positive that I’d looked down on the vault and its neighbors from a trail on the high ground above. Unfortunately, it also seemed to me that even for one of the old sections of Mount Auburn, the area was an exceptionally tortuous maze of streets, paths, ponds, monuments, and crypts. Worse, it wasn’t a section I knew well because there was only one dog monument nearby, and Dr. Stanton, Rowdy’s former owner, was buried elsewhere.
    If the sounds hadn’t led me there, I might never have found it. The voice I heard now was different from the one that had cried out. There were words. I couldn’t understand them. The sex was male. The tone was belligerent. Rowdy crowded against me. I could feel his muscles tighten. He has a nose for trouble. On his own, hearing it and smelling it, he’d head directly for its source. With misgivings, I loosened his leash to give him free run within its six-foot length. With a questioning glance at me —This is what you want, isn’t it ?—he confidently hit the end of the leash and justified the view of all the dumb people who’d ever said, “Hey, lady, who’s taking who for a walk?” Rowdy plainly knew where he was going. More than that! I knew as well as I knew my dog that he was, indeed, gleefully pulling toward trouble. The hitch was Rowdy’s varied conception of trouble. Rowdy might be making for human conflict. Alternatively, he could be in ardent pursuit of a meal of plump raccoon.
    We suddenly came to a place I remembered, a passageway between walls of polished stone. I couldn’t read the names on the walls now, couldn’t even remember whether they were cut into the rock or engraved on brass plaques, but I knew they were there. If we followed the passageway and turned sharply right, there’d be a little body of water on our left and, on our right, happily situated on the shore like a row of summer cottages, the quaint buildings that were, in fact, family crypts. The Gardner vault was in the row.
    But we didn’t follow the passageway. I tugged on Rowdy’s leash and managed to persuade him to reverse direction. I didn’t need to see his face to read his disgusted expression. I could almost hear him silently groan. My stupid ideas are a great trial to him. By patting my thigh and stepping