Paws before dying

does she get to go to a show? Hi, I’m Leah. I’m Holly’s niece.”
    “Cousin. Rose, this is my cousin, Leah Whitcomb. Rose Engleman and Caprice.”
    Leah said the usual things with unusual sincerity and prevented Kimi from pummeling Caprice.
    “Lincoln’s having a match on Thursday, you know.” Rose’s bright blue eyes were on Leah. Training dogs doesn’t keep your hair from turning gray—Rose had a mass of short white curls— but it does stop your eyes from fading. If your soul stays vivid, your irises do, too. “It’s a fun match. Oh, you got the flier.”
    “Bess gave them to us,” said Leah, holding out a piece of paper with one hand and reaching down to thump Kimi’s shoulders with the other.
    “Rose, this was Leah’s first class. Ever. She belongs in a real beginners’ class. She wouldn’t—”
    “Oh, yes, I would,” Leah interrupted.
    “And I have the perfect book for you,” Rose told her. “You stop by my house on your way home, and I’ll give it to you. It’s called Training Your Dog to Win Obedience Titles. ”
    “Curt Morsell,” I added.
    “She already has it?” Rose’s face was eager.
    “No,” I said. “I’ve read it, but I don’t own it.”
    “So you know it’s perfect for her.” “
    “Rose,” I said, “the dog in the book is a German shepherd. “So?” Leah said. ,
    “So it’s a good book,” I admitted. Without giving . Plot, I may reveal that the book follows Morsell's so trains a shepherd all the way through Novice, Open, and Utility. “But it might be kind of discouraging. With a malamute?” Rose dismissed the idea. “It’s the individual that counts.” My individuals who counted would have yelped at Caprice if I’d let her ride in their car. I drove, and Leah kept Rose company while she walked Caprice home along the edge of the wooded park to what turned out to be a prosperous-looking red brick house. The roof was gray slate, the casements had tiny diamond-shaped panes, and multicolored leaded-glass panels flanked the entry. A yellow bug light glowed in a wrought-iron cage over the front door, and a collection of artfully placed floods illuminated a lawn-serviced landscape of weed-free grass, pruned rhododendrons, and enough fir-bark mulch to smother all the vegetation in a square mile of tropical rain forest.
    I parked in front and lowered the windows to make sure Kimi had enough air. Then I let Rowdy out of his crate, snapped on his lead, and was trailing after him toward a fire hydrant when a bunch of louts hanging around some cars in the driveway of the next house started that raucous, hackneyed meowing routine usually pulled by gangs of young men threatened by the sight of a slightly built woman with a big, macho dog. From somewhere in back of the house, a dog began barking.
    “Don’t pay any attention to those awful things they’re saying,” I told Rowdy quietly. “They’re just jealous.”
    A master of understated ritual display, he swaggered to the fire hydrant and cocked a hind leg. If the dog doesn’t react to the human pussycats, they usually quit right away, but when Leah and Rose appeared, this gang suddenly crossed species and shifted to mynah bird whistles and baboon shrieks. Except to quicken her pace, Leah ignored the show.
    “I’m sorry. It’s like living next to a reform school.” Rose smiled, but her jaw tightened. “Come in.”
    She kept apologizing as I put Rowdy back in his crate, locked the car, and followed her inside.
    “Rose, really, it’s okay,” I said. “It isn’t the first time anyone’s ever given Leah a hard time. She can handle it. I think we were just surprised. You know, Newton?”
    Rose corrected me. “Newton isn’t the way people think. It’s much more diverse. People have a stereotype, the way they think it’s all Jewish. It isn’t, you know. Thirty percent. And people think it’s a town, including people who live here, but the population is about ninety thousand. That’s a city.”
    She led us into the kind of grown-up dining room you hardly ever see in Cambridge. The china cabinet was filled with Spode place settings and vegetable dishes instead of paperback books or Peruvian artifacts. An arrangement of yellow lilies and snapdragons replaced the usual stacks of academic journals and reprints on the long teak table. Arrayed on the sideboard were a couple of decanters topped with stoppers instead of transformed into makeshift Chianti-bottle candle holders, and neither Russian