Paws before dying

out extra water for the dogs and make sure the answering machine was on, he said, “The wake?”
    We’d seen him on our way back from shopping, and I’d told him about Rose.
    “Sort of. Visiting the house.”
    “Pacemaker,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Gadget implanted in her chest.”
    “I know what a pacemaker is. Rose had one? So that’s why... What’s this secrecy business? A pacemaker isn’t a treatment for VD or something.”
    “Eliot Park,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “You still going to dog school there?”
    “I know what you’re worried about. The graffiti, right? You think there’s some sinister connection with dog training at the park, between dog training and the graffiti and what happened to Rose. Well, the only connection is that Rose lived near the park and trained her dog there, so she’s the one who arranged to have the club use it. If we’d never been there, she’d have been training in the tennis courts. The club had nothing to do with anything. But obviously her death was less of a freak accident than we thought. I mean, a pacemaker? With water and electricity?”
    He shrugged.
    “Hey, how did you know that Rose had a pacemaker?”
    But Leah came down the back stairs, and Kevin wagged his big head back and forth. He apparently didn’t want to discuss an autopsy in front of her. He managed to lower the volume of his voice for the duration of two syllables: “Inquest.”
     
    The woman who opened Jack Engleman’s front door had coarse salt-and-pepper hair swept away from the thick, moist skin of her face, and short, stubby fingers with blunt nails. She introduced herself as Charlotte Zager, told us she was Jack’s sister, and then grabbed my hand and twisted it as ferociously as if it were a decayed molar with stubborn roots that was resisting extraction. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she was a dentist.
    The smallest of the three or four baskets of fruit on the tables in the hallway may have been ours, or maybe some of the apples and pears piled in a great silver bowl on the living room coffee table had come from the one I’d sent. Protestant death smells like gladioli, Jewish death like fruit. The oddest thing about all of those pineapples, all of the dozens of bunches of grapes and bananas, and the hundreds of pears, grapefruit, oranges, and apples was that no one seemed to be eating any fruit at all. In the dining room, people were helping themselves to bagels, lox, cream cheese, and tomatoes, and some of the people in the hall and living room were eating brownies and pastry, but everyone was treating the fruit as if it were made of wax.
    Rose’s death had dimmed the glow of Jack’s skin, and when you looked in his eyes, it was easy to tell that he wasn’t there. Even so, he welcomed us. Had anyone spoken to him the word Kevin had whispered to me? I felt shy and took his hand, but Leah threw her arms around him and held him, then sat with him on the long flower-print couch opposite the empty fireplace. It seemed to me that he was comforted by her youth and that with no sense of age at all, she offered him a timeless, immediate grace that I’d have been glad to give if I’d known where to find it—if I had it in me at all.
    Then Heather marched in holding Caprice in her arms and said rather loudly, “Holly, what do you think of a trophy? Nonantum’s trial’s November nineteenth. There’s lots of time. People’ll give. Everyone knew Rose.”
    She stretched an arm to the silver bowl, plucked out a polished Granny Smith, and drove large, gleaming incisors through it. The apple made a loud crunch.
    “What I have in mind,” she added, pointing to the silver bowl, “is something like that.”
    Caprice’s bright black eyes sighted down the line of her outstretched arm as she wondered which piece of fruit she was supposed to retrieve.
    “Vera won that.” Bess Stein had been sitting on a love seat talking quietly with Jack’s sister, but a lifetime of training dogs ad made her intolerant of gross misbehavior in any species. , had also taught her to read the minds of hypercompetitive handlers. To Bess and me, Heather’s intentions were as clear as if she’d been a hungry terrier eyeing a thick steak: She meant that memorial trophy for the highest-scoring poodle in Utility, and not just any highest-scoring poodle, either. Especially with Rose dead, the top poodle was apt to be her own.
    “You know,” Bess added, almost as if changing the subject, “Rose was the