Paws before dying

missing, and nails stuck out of long, thin strips of once-white plastic that had originally marked out the lines in the courts. Many of the plastic strips had come loose, and the nails that had tacked them in place now protruded upward.
    “How could Rose’ve trained here?” I said. “Look at it! She’d never have trained here. I don’t understand this, because I know she did.”
    “What’s it like back there ? Maybe it’s better. There’s a door there, a gate, on the right.”
    As Steve guessed, the distant row of courts was in much better shape than the first. Like the first, it had no nets and a pretty rough surface, but the white plastic strips were in place, the nails sharp-end-down in the clay.
    “Okay,” I said. “This is it. Obviously, this is where she trained. She kept Caprice on leash, or at least at heel, and they’d walk through that mess back there. Then once they got in here, she’d shut this second gate. And then it was fine.”
    “So which gate? Which was the one they found her by?”
    “The other one. The one that leads out of the courts. Somebody pointed it out to me, at class. I guess we were all feeling superstitious or something. Nobody really wanted to go near it. Actually, this explains something.”
    He got it, too. “She’s training in here. Between her and that first gate, there’s this fence.” He rapped his knuckles on the chain link that separated the rows of courts. “And then there’s the whole length of the other courts.”
    “And her mind’s on Caprice, right? What’s she going to notice?”
    If you’ve never trained a dog for show, maybe you don’t understand, but success in the ring is about ninety-nine percent a matter of attention, the dog’s and yours, and you lose yourself in your dog. His front feet are misaligned by one inch? Oh-oh. If the judge notices, that’s a half point lost. That’s where your attention goes, to the off front foot. Two baseball teams show up and start a game? Does it register? Yes. Great natural opportunity to proof the exercise, you think. Two teams of Martians land and launch a game of intergalactic planetball? Another great distraction, nothing more. A strange dog leaps into your training area? Now, that’s a real interruption, a break in the fusion. But a little thunder? The threat of rain? Some guy hanging around doing something off there somewhere? Who notices? Not a trainer like Rose Engleman.
    “Someone could’ve wired a bomb to that gate,” I said. “Jesus. Basically, someone did.”
    “Okay,” Steve said, “let’s walk through it. She finishes up in here. She snaps a lead on the dog, or she calls her to heel. They go through here.” He opened the gate to the first set of courts, and we passed through. “Okay, next?”
    “Next, they make a sharp right, here, and they go parallel to this center fence, and then down this way toward the gate, because it’s a sort of nail-free path.” I walked briskly down it because that’s how dog trainers are supposed to walk. The AKC says so. “And they get here, and guess what? They’re in a puddle.”
    As I’ve mentioned, the surface of the court was tom up and rough. In front of the gate was a wide, shallow depression, a dry puddle.
    “They’re in a puddle,” he repeated. “Can’t avoid it. And there aren’t any nails here. Rule that one out. There aren’t any nails for, say, the first two, three yards. Hey, were the dog’s feet cut? Punctured?”
    “No. I don’t think so. No. It was Friday night, and I saw her Sunday. She wasn’t limping.”
    “So she didn’t run around in here. Okay, the gate. You see anything?”
    I bent down as he’d done before. A flat strip of metal, maybe eight inches long, an inch wide, and quarter of an inch thick, formed the handle. I held it, moved it up and down, and ran the tips of my fingers over it. “Not a thing,” I said. “It’s smooth.”
    “It’s getting dark now,” he said. “Heavy clouds. Rain. You want to go home. You’re standing in a puddle. And?”
    “And my dog’s in the puddle. I’m feeling a little guilty, keeping her out in the rain. I’m thinking about home. And next time, what we’re going to work on, how we’re going to do it. I’m not thinking about this fence. The gate. The handle.”
    “So?”
    “So I’ve been here God knows how many times. I don’t need to look and see where the handle is. Maybe it’s dark enough so I can’t see it all that well, anyway. So what? I know