Paws before dying

is my home.” He stretched a hand in the direction of their house. “Theirs is theirs. I want to stay, I live with them. We coexist.”
    “So when Rose took the picture, she just did it, and she had it developed. And she didn’t say anything to you.”
    He nodded. “But she did talk about... You remember that case? She followed that very closely.”
    “The man who was convicted.”
    Jack nodded again. Practically everyone in Massachusetts knew about the case. A guy had been convicted and sent to jail sometime the previous winter or early spring because a smart, caring neighbor didn’t just run out screaming and yelling when the guy was beating his dog with a board, but carefully took a whole series of photographs. The neighbor’s photographic evidence was crucial.
    “So,” I said, “she knew that pictures would do it, that if she got it on film, she could really get him. It’s a little hard to tell in this picture, but why else would she’ve taken it? She saw whoever it is beating a dog, and she remembered the case. So she got the camera. This is the only one? The only picture?”
    “She was a terrible photographer,” he said affectionately. “Yeah.” It was impossible to disagree. I nearly asked him whether he’d been keeping an eye on the Johnsons’ house and yard, but I stopped myself. He’d had other concerns. “Obviously, this isn’t enough. I wonder if... At a match, not so long ago—Rose was there—the middle brother, Dale, showed up with his dog, and he started hitting him, right there. There was sort of a scene. But... from what I can tell, this looks... Is this still going on?”
    He looked as if I’d taken a long time to grasp the point. “You’re asking me? I’m asking you.”
    “You haven’t seen...?”
    “No, I haven’t seen. I want peace, but not peace at any price.
    And Rose understood that. She wasn’t keeping any secret from me. She was waiting. And now...? You’ve seen these dogs?”
    “I’ve seen Willie’s dog quite a bit, mostly from a distance, though. He trains with us, but I’m not in the same class. I’m not positive I can tell, but Righteous—that’s the dog—he doesn’t look abused. Usually you expect something. If you move your hand toward the dog, maybe he’ll shy away. He’ll cringe, or he’ll show fear.” I reached my hand across the table toward Caprice, who had planted herself cheerfully in Jack’s lap. She elongated her neck and gave a happy little stretch in my direction. “That’s exactly what you don’t see,” I said. “You can tell what she expects. Hands mean pats, food, good things. With an abused dog, you get the opposite. And they see feet, they expect to be kicked. But it isn’t always that obvious. And those old stories about loyalty to abusive owners are basically true. You might think they’d hate the owners, but they don’t. You’re more apt to see fear. Or aggression. Sometimes it’s real terror of something. A place. A situation.”
    “If it’s going on . . Jack started to say.
    “You have to decide,” I finished for him.
    He looked insulted. “If this is going on next door to Rose’s house?”
    “Of course,” I said. “Look, about the pictures. Rose was right. That seems to be what works, lots of hard evidence. Pictures. Do you know how to use a camera? Could you...?” He didn’t brag. All he did was show me some blowups of photos he’d taken of Rose, Vera, Caprice, and a couple of other poodles posed with a very young Rose.
    “These are incredible,” I said. I meant it. In case you didn’t know, dogs aren’t easy to photograph, and taking good pictures of dogs and people together is tough. “I guess you could more than manage a snapshot.”
    “I have the camera upstairs, loaded,” he said. “By a window. Where Rose took this one. But I haven’t...”
    “There’s the MSPCA. There’s also a lawyer I know,” I said. “He knows about things like this. If there’s anything else you could do, or anything anyone can do, he’ll know. You want his name?”
    After I wrote it down for him, he walked me to the door. On the way, I told him that I’d been to see his sister and that she seemed like a terrific dentist.
    “Charlotte’s been a peach,” he said. “The whole, uh, all of it, it’s been easier since our mother passed away. Last winter, it was. She was, uh, she could never, never have accepted Rose.”
    “Has your father left? He’s gone back to Florida?”
    “Still with