Ruffly Speaking

driveway, and although Highland Street was only a few blocks away, I wanted to take it to Stephanie’s. I hate hot weather. But Steve argued that it was a beautiful evening, and Rita agreed with him. Popping firecrackers volleyed like gun. shots, and the heat, humidity, and air pollution had turned the evening sky a glowing orange-red that reminded me of an oil refinery fire I’d once witnessed on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Instead of whining about the heat and bragging about my privileged childhood on the cold Atlantic coast, I said that it certainly smelled and sounded like the Fourth of July, and it did, too, but I regretted my words as soon as I’d spoken. Mentioning the charcoal briquettes, lighter fluid, and charred chicken skin was fine, but the rat-a-tat-tat of the cherry bombs must have drilled through Rita’s aids and into her ears like a sadistic dentist drilling into the unanesthetized nerve of an abscessed molar.
    To avoid embarrassing Rita, I withheld an apology and changed the subject. I’d called Steve earlier to outline the ultrasound explanation of Ruffly’s episodes. As we walked down Appleton Street, I began to fill in the details. Rita joined me. My ideas about the no-force method, though, I kept entirely to myself. Why, I’m not sure, except that I’d started to wonder whether I might be suffering from a psychiatric ailment that I’d previously dismissed as one of Rita’s therapist jokes: reverse paranoia, the delusion that you’re following someone. Sorry, but that’s a direct quote.
    As we crossed Huron Avenue, Steve said, “But you didn’t find the source of the ultrasound.”
    “I checked outside and around the kitchen,” I said, “but I couldn’t go poking in Stephanie’s closets, and, of course, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. If it’s one of the zappers meant for kennels, it would be a fairly big black box, I think. Or it could be a small one that Morris bought and tucked away somewhere.”
    Steve and I stride along at about the same big-dog pace. We kept glancing at Rita to make sure that we weren’t going too fast for her. When she spoke, she sounded a little out of breath. “Holly, was Morris the kind of person who might have used one of those on his dogs?” She cleared her throat. “As we both have reason to know, and maybe the less said the better, not everyone feels comfortable...”
    “Doug says no, but I’m not so sure. If the neighbors complained, Morris might have gotten all apologetic and ordered a Yap Zapper or something from one of the catalogs, and then never used it. He probably ordered chew toys and dog beds and stuff anyway, so it’s possible that, while he was at it, he ordered some kind of ultrasound gadget, too. But Morris used professional handlers. Groomers. If he’d really decided that the dogs needed training, he’d probably have hired a trainer, although it’s also possible that he would’ve been afraid that a trainer would be too hard on them.” I avoided Rita’s eyes. “I really don’t know.” What I knew for sure was that Morris Lamb would never deliberately have poisoned himself. Also, he couldn’t have tampered with the valve of the gas grill; he died in early May, long before Stephanie’s near accident.
    “Could be a neighbor,” Steve suggested. “That ad’s in the catalogs. ‘The ultimate solution to your neighbor’s barking dog.’ ”
    “There is this woman who lives next door,” I said. “Alice Savery.”
    “Savery’s sister,” Rita said.
    “Steve, you and I looked at her house. The really big run-down one next to Stephanie’s. But the thing is, Alice Savery’s very antidog, so she’s not exactly likely to be on R.C. Steele’s mailing list. And, besides, what really gets to her is dogs in her yard, digging or leaving urine spots on the lawn, that kind of thing. If she uses any kind of dog repellant, it’s probably... what’s it called? That stuff that you sprinkle around.”
    Steve supplied the brand name: “Get Off My Garden.”
    “Yes. And that’s in R.C. Steele, but it’s in the gardening catalogs, too, which is probably what Miss Savery gets, and they also carry, oh, netting to keep birds off your fruit trees and maybe electric fences. But wait a minute. There is something to get rid of gophers, I think. I saw it in a catalog at my father’s.” Buck is no gardener. He stays on the mailing lists because every few years, he orders a couple of apple trees to replace the