Ruffly Speaking

terrified me.
     

20
     
     No matter how tropical the temperature in India, the faithful continue to make way for the cow, but here in Cambridge, the hellish summer climate turns our sanctuary into Bombay in August, and Thursday night dog worship at the Cambridge Armory takes a two-month summer recess. Thus at seven o’clock on the evening of Thursday, July 2, I stood dogless on Stephanie Benson’s doorstep. When I rang Morris’s chimes, Ruffly barked, but by the time Stephanie opened the door, he was playing canine good citizen at her side. As I followed them into the entrance hall—no falls this time—and through the living room and dining room, I kept a close eye on Ruffly for a sign of something amiss, but, as on my previous visit, he was lively, friendly, and alert. When we reached the kitchen, I bent down to pat him.
    In contrast to the living and dining rooms, the kitchen still contained some of Morris’s belongings, including an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with cookbooks. The mail-order kennel-supply catalogs stacked on one of the shelves could have been Stephanie’s, but the pastel premium lists and entry blanks for AKC shows that lay on top of the R.C. Steele catalog had certainly belonged to Morris.
    The rest of the house, or at least the rooms I’d seen, had oversize casement windows with those cranks that never work and the kinds of sliding glass doors that can be lifted right out of their tracks and safely rested against a wall while the burglar’s busy inside. In the kitchen, though, what looked to me like new Andersen windows gave a view of Alice Savery’s house. Better yet, the wall that faced the backyard consisted of natural-wood-and-glass panels alternating with hinged doors that opened onto a big redwood deck thick with patio furniture and equipped with a gas grill. The stove, refrigerator, and dishwasher were of some strange German-sounding brand, but everything else was standard expensive new American kitchen—polyurethaned wood floor, granite-topped island with built-in cutting boards, handsome cherry table with Windsor chairs, and those cabinets with glass-paned doors favored by people with the money to hire others to keep the interiors fit for public display.
    The last time I’d been in this room, Morris had been in the midst of inventing some Mediterranean-inspired fish stew. Every surface had been covered with fresh plum tomatoes, bunches of parsley, fish heads, fish frames, salmon chunks, swordfish steaks, and lumps of what may have been monkfish. Bowls of bivalves were disgorging sand into water, and live lobsters were crawling around in the sink. The floor was thick with dog toys and Bedlingtons, the air with anise, wine, and basil. Morris was drinking amaretto and singing snatches of “Ave Maria.”
    The cookbooks on the lower shelves still showed the same old dog-gnawed spines, and Nelson and Jennie had left permanent tooth marks on the legs of the table and chairs. But the counters were now almost bare, and there wasn’t a Nylabone or a ball in sight. No one was singing, and the smell was so unpromising of dinner that if I’d been blindfolded, I’d have been unable to guess which room I was in. On a counter under the bracket that had held Morris’s wall phone sat an answering machine and a big white phone with oversize buttons.
    The light from the windows and doors and from recessed spots set everywhere in the ceiling was as bright as ever, and when I knelt down to say hello to Ruffly, I got a good look at him. I didn’t really expect to find some diagnostic clue that Steve had missed, but if Ruffly happened to be showing one, I wasn’t about to forgo the chance to observe it, either. My close-up inspection revealed only that Stephanie took beautiful care of her dog. Ruffly’s black-and-tan coat felt as smooth, clean, and healthy as it looked. His eyes were clear, his nails neatly clipped, his teeth free of tartar. His giant ears had been recently swabbed. I ran my hands Over the dog, talking softly to him as I did so.
    “Doug’s out back planting things.” Stephanie was uncorking a bottle of wine. She paused to gesture toward the deck.
    I smiled. “I saw his car out front.”
    “I asked him to stay for dinner—I thought you wouldn’t mind?—but he says he can’t.”
    “That’s too bad.”
    “Wine is all right, isn’t it? White. But if you’d prefer something else...”
    “It’s fine,” I assured her.
    Stephanie wore a loose