Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

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    “When we get to the hotel, I’ll run upstairs and change.“
    „What about the tapes?”
    “We’ll find a friendly video store later tonight. I don’t care if you have to buy a fucking VCR to accomplish this, but one way or another, we’re going to watch these tonight. Are you with me?”
    “Of course. And that’s not a bad idea.”
    “What isn’t?”
    “Buying a VCR. I lost the one I had in the settlement.” The cab stopped a block from the Ritz, as instructed. Chip began to reach into his pocket for money, but I got to my wallet fester. “Allow me,” I said. “It’s on Sam anyway.”
    When I opened the door, Dashiell practically fell out, and Betty got out, too, by walking across Chip’s lap and mine. Even good training has its limitations. Sometimes a dog has a better idea than you do about how to get something done.
    “Go on ahead,” he said. “I’ll see you at dinner.”
    I took the elevator this time. Once in my room, I changed out of Chip’s shirt, hanging it all by itself in my closet. Then I stashed the backpack on the floor and actually closed the closet door. My mother would have been proud.
    I was the last to arrive at dinner. There we were, all sitting as we always had, except that there were three fewer people around the table. We apparently pattern-trained as easily as our dogs did, forming comforting habits almost immediately in new situations. My spot. My chair. My place in the world.
    “Ah, there she is,” Sam said.
    It seemed to me her chair was a little closer to Woody’s than it had been at yesterday’s dinner.
    When I’d looked at his phone records, I noticed he was calling home every day, usually before breakfast. When he’d taken my hand in the hallway, just before telling me that Martyn was dead, I’d felt the callus his wedding band had made on the ring finger of his left hand, a hard ridge just above where the ring would be, were he wearing it. There was no telltale tan line. Then again, it wasn’t summer.
    But Sam was a big girl. If Woody was married, she knew that. If she decided to be his perk for this symposium, she knew what that meant, too.
    “We all took a lovely walk in the park, but we didn’t know where you were,” she went on. “Some of the students came too. Bucky did an impromptu talk about promotion for their fledgling businesses. Woody told a group how to condition their dogs for agility competition. And Beryl took a small group birding.”
    “I was working on my notes,” I told her. “For Saturday.”
    Sam nodded. The waiters began serving. I sipped my wine and looked around at the group, no longer seeing them only as professional colleagues. Now as I looked at each one, I wondered which of them had killed the three of us who were no longer here. And why?
    Sure, I could tell Chip stories, some of them even plausible sounding. It was one of the men, killing off the competition. It was one of the men, green with envy over the lovemaking that others were enjoying. It was one of the women, unlucky at love, lucky in murder. But I couldn’t buy any of them. Somehow, when you looked more closely, things didn’t add up.
    It’s said that people kill over nothing. But it’s never really over nothing. Certainly not to the killer. Quite the contrary—the slight, the promise not kept, the display of disrespect, these could blacken the sky. They could leave nothing but hopelessness in their wake. And a desperate need to get even.
    If an offense could be undetectable to everyone but the killer, how would we see it? How would we find the corner to peel away the top layer and see what lay underneath?
    “It’s not so,” I heard Tracy say, wondering what came before that I’d missed.
    “But Cathy never had a problem,” Bucky said, smiling at Tracy’s crushed-looking face.
    “Of course she didn’t,” Tracy said, a lot too loud, “look at her.”
    So of course we all did.
    “Women who look like that never have trouble. In anything.”
    I turned to look at Cathy, who had a look of panic in her eyes now, having just lost the philanderer she thought she loved.
    “That’s not fair,” Audrey said. “You have no idea how hard Cathy works. You’re assuming that success fell in her lap because she’s beautiful. Well, let me tell you. Life is never that simple. And right now, she’s feeling—”
    “Stop it,” Cathy shouted. “Stop it right now. First of all, you’re talking about me as if I weren’t here. And second, I