Ruffly Speaking

otherwise doomed to end. As it was, Stephanie might have smelled the gas in time to put away her lighter and turn the valve off. Also, even if she’d used her lighter, she’d might well have survived. In reality, a bad burn would have been terrible, but it seemed to me that, given the happy outcome, Ruffly would have done well to save his mistress from certain death, not just from uncertain injury. Furthermore, I would have preferred that Stephanie not smoke. For Dog’s Life, Ruffly should have been perfectly heroic; Stephanie, absolutely blameless. In toying with the idea of a few touch-ups—inevitable fatality, no cigarettes-—I found myself irked at both Ruffly and Stephanie for forcing me to choose between deceiving our readers and disappointing them.
    I could hardly expect Stephanie to share my discontent; she was a priest, not a dog writer. Her faith in Ruffly fully restored, she was unequivocally delighted. Just before my visit to Ivan and Bernadette, I’d reached Steve, and he’d agreed that to refuse the invitation would have been mean and sour.
    “This is a barbecue?” he asked.
    “That’s what she said.”
    He got what I’d missed. “On the same gas grill?” He sounded more amused than worried.
    I wasn’t really worried, either. In fact, when I was driving home from Ivan and Bernadette’s, I heard a story on the radio about the holiday crowds already packing the Esplanade, and according to the weather report, the temperature was eighty-five and rising, so I was glad that Steve and I weren’t going to the Hatch Shell after all and equally glad that we had some kind of July Fourth event to attend instead, even a dog party at a rectory. Wild times.
    When I got home, I had to ease myself into the back hallway because the crate in which I’d incarcerated Willie yesterday took up most of the floor space. It was an ordinary collapsible wire cage designed for easy carrying and storage, but Rita hadn’t folded it correctly and must have had a tough time just getting it down the stairs. To stow it away properly, I had to set it up and then break it down and latch it, and the metal-on-metal noise of the wire sides hitting the floor pan must’ve alerted Rita to my return. One floor up, her door opened. I listened. Willie barked. Rita didn’t give even a low growl. The door closed.
    About twenty minutes later, after I’d stored the crate in the cellar and put the dogs out to doze in the shade of the yard, Rita rapped so sharply on my kitchen door that her rings must have bruised her knuckles. When I opened up, though, what she thrust at me wasn’t the battered hand of friendship, but the cheese-improved Plaque Attacker I’d freely and generously given to Willie a mere twenty-four hours earlier. Before leaving the toy in the crate, however, I certainly hadn’t encased it in a clear plastic bag.
    “Look!” I said happily. “He’s been chewing it already. See? It’s kind of rough around the pointy end.” Standing there in the hallway glaring at me, Rita looked like a long-suffering tenant driven at last to confront a slumlord with irrefutable evidence of the presence of rats. As if she could hardly bear to touch the plastic bag, she extended it far from her body, pinched between the thumb and first finger of her right hand. She honestly looked as if she were proffering a plastic-encased rodent carcass.
    “Oh, how horrible,” I said. “But I couldn’t use poison, could I? Not with the dogs around.”
    Rita finally opened her mouth, but she hadn’t softened any. “What?”
    “The trap.” I suppressed a grin. “It’s not very humane, I know, but, Rita, I got desperate. Dog toys? Those things really breed. Two today, ten tomorrow, a hundred thousand next week. So yesterday afternoon, as soon I heard that telltale scurrying, I ran and got out the trap. I’m terribly sorry about the dead Plaque Attacker, but—”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Rita snapped. “And stop smirking!”
    “Rita, is something wrong? No, don’t tell me. Rita, this is entirely my fault. A terrier? Bred to go after vermin. Willie went right after that nasty little dog toy, didn’t he? And got inadvertently caught in the trap.” I eyed Rita. She said nothing. “Brave little fellow,” I added. “Who would’ve thought he had it in him?”
    The Plaque Attacker still dangling from her hand, Rita said, “Your key is for emergencies only. Isn’t that our agreement?”
    “Rita, I’ve just—”
    “And cut