Ruffly Speaking

afraid that we’ll come upon the pig suddenly and that the dogs will lunge before I can stop them. So Steve is always a good dog-walking companion, but if, God forbid, one of the dogs somehow managed to get loose and attack Leo, a veterinarian would obviously be the perfect person to have on hand.
    Steve had let himself in and was sitting at the kitchen table idly fooling around with Rowdy and Kimi while simultaneously drinking Geary’s and studying an article on salivary cysts. Anyone with a delicate stomach does well to avoid veterinary medicine and, for that matter, dogs altogether, but, so far as I know, nothing actually compels vets to crave spaghetti whenever they’re reading up on tapeworms. Salivary cysts? Press on them, and what you get is brownish fluid, but don’t tell Geary’s I said so. Maine needs all the business it can get.
    The evening was cool for Cambridge in early July, and pig-free, too, at least on the route we took, Concord to Fayerweather, then across Huron and up the sociogeo-graphic hill toward Governor Weld’s house and Brattle Street. Steve walked Kimi, and I took Rowdy, who suddenly becomes a one-person dog whenever he decides that Kimi is edging him out in their rivalry for my affection. As we walked, I told Steve about everything that had happened at Stephanie Benson’s, with particular emphasis on Ruffly, of course.
    “What he did was very, very sudden,” I said. “One second, he was standing there, and the next second, he’d jerked his head to the side and flattened his ears. Steve, it was exactly as if someone had slapped him.”
    “And what was he doing just before that?”
    “Standing there, I think.”
    “Alert?”
    “He’s always alert. His ears were up. And if I remember it right, his tail was wagging a little. But he wasn’t reacting to one of his sounds, if that’s what you mean, and the doorbell wasn’t ringing or anything like that. I don’t know! He was just there."
    “Any trembling?”
    “I don’t think so. He did seem frightened, I guess, but I don’t think he was shaking.”
    “And after?Anything about his gait?”
    “Nothing. Why? When you saw him, did You...?”
    “No.”
    “You look as if there’s something…”
    “I’d better get a neurological consult. Treating these assistance dogs—”
    “Steve, I am telling you, it didn’t look neurological. You should’ve seen it! It just did not look medical.”
    “That’s a real risky assumption, Holly. I wish I’d seen it. One of the things about treating these dogs is that the owners depend on them, so you’re real reluctant to bring the animal in for observation. If Mrs. Benson’s open to it, I’m going to stop by this weekend.”
    “I’m sure she will be, and she understands about tonight.” Steve trains with Cambridge, too. Since we don’t meet in the summer, he’d assumed he’d have that Thursday evening free and had volunteered to do a rabies immunization clinic at a local shelter.
    We paused to let the dogs sniff an overgrown privet hedge. Rowdy made a couple of passes at it, cocked his leg, lowered it, turned around, and hit the spot again. Then Kimi checked it out and, not to be outdone, squeezed her hindquarters against the privet and executed a full rear-end bounce. Steve laughed. A man who admires the sight of a bitch lifting both legs at once? And a vet, too? The man for me. Ah, love.
    After this romantic little interlude, we returned to the topic of Ruffly, and Steve said, “Tell me about the environment.”
    “What?” The request threw me for a second. Sure, that hyperintellectual Off-Brattle coldness is toxic. But enough to sicken a dog?
    “Anything that could serve as a stimulus,” Steve explained patiently.
    “I just had a thought. If there is a stimulus, then wouldn’t Morris’s dogs have shown some response to it, too?”
    “It’s worth finding out,” Steve said.
    “I’ll ask Doug Winer. He has Morris’s dogs. He’ll know. Also, after it happened, I went outside to see if there was anything there, and there wasn’t, really, except that Ivan, the little boy Leah’s always talking about, was r ight in the middle of the next-door neighbor’s lawn dumping a lot of salt there.”
    “That old trick.”
    “Well, with this woman, it really was meaner than it sounds, because her garden is incredible. She must work on it all the time. So it’s not like killing plants in my yard. It’s more like doing something to one of my dogs, except that the