Gaits of Heaven

children, but they are, uh, vulnerable. Wyeth could go to his mother’s. He splits his time between his parents. You might know his mother. Johanna Green? She lives somewhere near you. She has a papillon she walks a lot. Dainty little blond woman.”
    “I think I’ve seen her, but I don’t know her.”
    “Let me go try to reach her. And Caprice. Let’s mull that one over."
    “Her father?”
    “Monty Brainard lives in New York. She’ll be lucky if he bothers to show up at all, but don’t tell her I said that. It’s not her view of him, and she’s better off with the one she cultivates. Sad situation all around.”
    “Monty,” I repeated. Say it ain’t so! At the risk of leaving myself vulnerable to psychiatric insinuations, I have to confess that my immediate reaction to Barbara’s negative assessment of Monty Brainard was that Barbara just had to be wrong. That’s not exactly a confession, is it? The confession part has to do with the grounds for my skepticism, which were—here’s the confession—not just religious but somewhat peculiarly religious, at least in the eyes of those who consider the faith handed down to me by my dog-worshiping parents to be odd, strange, weird, mentally unhealthy, or outright heretical, as it certainly is not. That being said, I was inclined on religious grounds to form a favorable opinion of Monty Brainard or, in fact, anyone else named Monty, because of the elevated position in the Malamute Pantheon occupied by a certain legendary Monty, namely, Ch. Benchmark Captain Montague, a justifiably famous Alaskan malamute bred and owned by my friend Phyllis Hamilton. Not that I imagined, of course, that every canine and human creature who shared the name Monty with the prototypic Monty simply had to possess the beauty, power, and strength of character so notable in Phyllis’s dog. Well, not that I exactly believed that Monty Brainard absolutely had to be a good guy. Still, let’s say that I was biased in his favor. And if my take seems irrational, let’s just suppose that you hear someone make a negative remark about a person named Mother Teresa of Calcutta or Saint Francis of Assisi. Point made? Thus my readiness to assume the best about Monty Brainard.
    Sirens wailed.
    Gesturing in their direction, Barbara said, “Caprice doesn’t need to see this. Can you get her out of there?”
    Wanting to be as kind as Barbara expected, I said, “Yes. I’ll go get her out of the house. And take her home with me.”
     

CHAPTER 7
     
    “I know who you are,” said Caprice Brainard. “You’re Holly Winter, and you’re Leah Whitcomb’s cousin. You train dogs.”
    It was less than a minute after I’d finished speaking to Barbara. Intending to leave Dolfo outdoors while I went upstairs to rescue Caprice, I’d entered the backyard through a gate at the end of a short driveway that also served as a three-car parking area. I’d found Caprice seated on a teak bench. Ignoring the sirens and the voices of the men and women responding to my 911 call, Caprice said, “Leah’s bright, and she’s kind. And she’s so beautiful. At Harvard, everyone’s intelligent, but Leah is special. She’s a good human being. I’m Caprice Brainard. I’m Eumie’s daughter. My mother did not kill herself.”
    I do train dogs, of course, but training is the least of it. My true vocation and avocation is dog watching. Indeed, so ardently have I watched dogs that I have half merged with my subject and thus lack a strictly human eye to cast on the behavior of my fellow human beings. Consequently, when I should perhaps have rushed to the bereaved and distressed Caprice and given her the human equivalent of the tail-wagging, face-licking comfort that my own malamutes would have offered, I took dispassionate note of the total absence of any such exchange between Caprice and Dolfo. Set loose in the yard, Dolfo returned to the gate, jumped up on it, popped down, and then sniffed his way along a well-worn dog path that ran parallel to the fence. Caprice, in turn, addressed herself exclusively to me, a stranger, and took no more notice of Dolfo than she did of the house, the deck, the fence, or the many bird feeders. Had my Rowdy been there instead of Dolfo, he’d have approached her, fixed his soft, dark eyes on her face, stationed himself within stroking distance, and probably raised a paw. Of my three malamutes, only Rowdy was a certified therapy dog; he’d been taught to wait for my permission or