Ruffly Speaking

fluoride-impregnated rawhide chew in the form of a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, she got herself under control, turned to the right pages, and verified what I’d been saying. In brief, if you wanted to explode auditory dynamite in your dog’s ears, there were a lot of ways to do it—audible or inaudible to people, bark activated, manually operated, with or without adjustable sensitivity, and with or without a lot of other options, too: waterproof cases, happy tunes to reward the dog for good behavior, a maximum effective range varying all the way from a mere ten feet up to a whopping seventy-five feet.
    I picked up the Yap Zapper again. “This would probably do it, if you stood right outside the window. Except, for all we know, I guess, it could be inside—one of those big kennel models? It could be any of the ones that people can’t hear. The point is, this is what’s doing it, something like this. It has to be.”
    Rita looked sad and tired. “That isn’t really the Point, is it? The real point is, Holly, what a vicious, vile thing for someone to do. And to a hearing dog!”
    “Ruffly’s kept right on working,” I said, “but, yeah, it could’ve gone the other way, and, Rita, Stephanie’s had Ruffly for over a year, and, by now, she takes it for granted that he’ll do the listening. So besides being really hard on him, it could’ve been... But, Rita, we don’t necessarily know.... It is possible that it’s all a mistake.”
    “I don’t see how.”
    I hesitated to raise the topic, but it had to be said. “In one of the catalogs? Maybe in more than one, there’s one of these ultrasound things that’s actually marketed as, uh...” As my voice dropped, my gaze rose involuntarily upward. “As, uh, the simple solution to the problem of your neighbor’s noisy dog...”
    “Oh,” Rita said flatly.
    “The idea is, uh, no direct confrontation. Or what to do when you’ve asked the people a million times, and the dog is still driving you crazy.”
    “Yes, I get the idea.”
    “So it’s possible that it isn’t even aimed at Ruffly. Ruffly can’t be the only dog around there, and he barks now and then, but he’s not a nuisance barker. As I said, those gadgets aren’t selective. If they get triggered, they just blast away. Any dog in the vicinity gets hit, not just the one making the noise. Also, whoever’s doing it doesn’t necessarily...” I didn’t finish the sentence aloud. The salt on Alice Savery’s lawn? Ivan had known that the salt would kill the grass, of course, but he was simply too young to grasp Alice Savery’s devotion to what struck me as her companion vegetables. “Rita, it’s even remotely possible that Morris Lamb owned one of those things and that it’s still in the house. Maybe if the batteries are weak... like smoke detectors? You know how they go off when the batteries are low?”
    “That’s a very benign hypothesis.”
    “It is,” I agreed. “And Doug... Well, I’m not sure, but Doug... Doug Winer was Morris’s partner, and it’s his house now, and he’d probably know if Morris had bought one of those things. And, of course, Doug would know exactly what something like that could do to a hearing dog, and he’s such a hovery landlord, and he knows about Ruffly’s episodes, so even if he’d forgotten that Morris had one of these gadgets, he certainly would’ve remembered by now.”
    Rita smiled sourly. “Or he’s hit on a strange way to deliver an eviction notice.”
    “Oh, evicting Stephanie is probably the last thing Doug wants to do,” I said. “It’s true that Doug’s cousin, who’s an old friend of Stephanie’s, did pressure him to rent to her, but why would he want her out? She’s got to be a great tenant—”
    “Don’t remind me. Hard to find.”
    “Hard to find,” I agreed. “And Doug lives with his elderly parents, and if he’d wanted to move the whole family to Highland Street, he had the chance, right after Morris died. And he didn’t. He stayed in Brookline with his parents, and he rented Morris’s house to Stephanie. Besides, I met his father at a show, a while ago, and I really don’t think that this would be a great time to move him anywhere. He—Mr. Winer—is... I guess he’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and it seems to me it would be pretty disorienting for him to move from where he is. But that’s... You don’t know Doug. If he wanted Stephanie out, he’d just... Come to think of it, I’m not